Stirred Mind

Praja Know.Care.Participate

2007-07-17T03:58:00.000Z

I am glad to introduce to you to praja.in a citizen portal for Bangalore. I have been involved in the development of the site and hope you will find the site very meaningful and useful. I will be brief here and just present the introduction mail I wrote for the site here. I would be thankful if you pick the following piece and run it on your blog or mail it to friends.

Dear friend,

I am glad to invite you to join a new website a few like minded folks have developed.Take a moment to visit Praja Bangalore now.

Praja, starting from its name, is a citizen's website. Its however not one of those things like Orkut or Facebook though. Praja is a place for responsible citizens to meet, interact and discuss ideas. Praja provides a platform for citizens to know more about their city, care towards the city and participate in their city's development. See 'about' page to know more and read a more passionate introduction. Or read the intro in Kannada.

As India progresses into a developing nation, it would face its own unique problems. Many of the cities are already facing problems with basic amenities, infrastructure etc. These problems are being compounded by lack of dialogue between authorities and responsible citizens. We believe that you as a responsible citizen will come forward to discuss the issues and offer solutions.Being associated with Bangalore, it was only logical to start with Bangalore site. But if we have enough interested folks, we will have other sites up soon to.

Do take a moment to register yourself and look around the site. There are several features like Blogs, forums, galleries and most importantly, project tracking pages (where you can monitor the progress of Bangalore Metro, International Airport etc). You can post in Kannada too if you wish. Visit this page to know what features are available for users and content creators.

If you are in Bangalore, we need you to tell us your view from ground zero.
If you are associated with Bangalore but not staying there, we would love to hear your experiences with other places and how Bangalore can implement the best you have seen.
If you are from other city, do join and start the discussion. If there are enough folks from your place you can start your city-specific praja site too!

In a nutshell, you have no reason not to join, unless you really dont really care for your city and its problems.

See you there!

-Praja team

Coming soon

2007-07-16T04:50:00.000Z

Very soon, you will see my posts related to Bangalore traffic and infrastructure on a new site. A site that is dedicated to connect people who care about their cities.

A local, passionate and knowledgeable group of citizens, voicing their opinions and getting heard in the right way from those who are responsible. Finally its time for all of us to do more than just cribbing.

Know.Care.Participate.

Watch this space tomorrow.

How to sell books online in India

2007-04-29T19:38:00.000Z

Please read my post 'about' Business Ideas before you do anything with this idea.

There are plenty of online bookstores in India but unfortunately there aren't any that come to your mind when you really want to buy books online. For people who wonder why Amazon has not entered India yet, Bazee co-founder Avnish Bajaj says in this interview that the market is not big enough yet. But the good news is that the market is the correct size now for your favourite offline bookstore to go online and when the market finally grows, they will be in a very good shape to encash their 'first-comer' advantage.

With this in thinking, I gave a few suggestions to folks at www.sapnaonline.com the only online store from which I have bought books and happy with their services. I am reproducing the chain of mails in which I shared my ideas about how they can capture the market better. This is not an idea to help someone open a business but to improve the existing one so it is in a different format than the rest of my business ideas.

To start with, I did not have anyone's id at Sapna so I sent the mail to customer care hoping that they would notice. I must say I did not have too much hope that they will.

from:Narasimha Shastri
to: customercare@sapnaonline.com
date:Apr 16, 2007 2:16 PM

subject:Contact details enquiry

Hello,I am an old
customer of Sapna (both online and offline) and I amwriting to make some suggestions.The nature of suggestiosn I want to make are of very high impact on the business and hence I would like to get in touch with the personincharge of making top-level decisions for Sapna Infoway.I would be glad if you could give me the e-mail address of the personwith whom I can discuss how to make Sapnaonline.com a better website and make it India's best and most popular online book store.
Thanks,
Shastri

But they did indeed reply. They have a very responsive customer care (which was also my experience from them during my purchases from them).

From: "Jayashree, Sapna Book House"
To: "Narasimha Shastri"
Sent: Wednesday, April 18, 2007 12:38 PM
Subject: Re: Contact details enquiry

Hello Mr.Shastri
Greetings! Thankyou for your interest for Sapnaonline.com .We welcome your suggestions .kindly feel free to mail me.
thanking you
Jayshree
Batavia - Buss Devp

I was pretty encouraged so I sent this mail out.

from:Narasimha Shastri
to:"Jayashree, Sapna Book House"
date : Apr 18, 2007 9:28 AM
subject:Suggestions for your business

Jayashree,
I am glad to obtain a response from you. About me, I am an Engineer by education who works mostly in R&D sector. However I have a strong interest in Indian businesses prominently the new-economy ones. I have no formal education in business. In the attached document I am also explaining why I am offering these suggestions. I have no idea of the background of people who will read it so I have not made the document too technical. Technicalities can be discussed later if you like the theme. I am attaching a PDF file that contains a write up about my suggestions and ideas for you.
I want you to read this document with the following things in mind.
* I have no idea of how big or small you are and how your sales numbers look.
* I dont have a very good understanding of traditional publishing/book selling businessI might hence be wrong in my thinking.
I would be glad if you could comment on my ideas and tell me if at all they are feasible. My only strong point is that the sooner you can reinvent yourself, the better. Because if you dont, someone else will and in online businesses, second place is not good enough. Will look forward for your reply.
Shastri

Here is what that PDF contained:

I start with the presumption that you want to be India’s most famous, biggest and successful online bookstore. I wish to give you my opinion on what things need to be done for you to get there. There are several things that you are doing right and there are several things that are already in place for you to achieve that goal. I want to talk about what more need to be done to set yourself apart from the other in the field.

Sapnaonline is a fairly well designed site with very customer friendly features. It also
has a large collection of books and ships fast and cheap. The customer support through mail and phone is above average too. I however dare to say that over the last 4 years that I have been observing Sapnaonline, there has not been a growth that it deserved.
I have been thinking about Indian Online businesses for sometime and I want to share my thoughts with you. (Please see the end of this document to know why I am doing this). Here are my suggestions for your website.
Start a affiliate program
Firstly as an online bookstore, your customer base is mostly the generation that uses internet for day-to-day lives. These are the people who use e-mail every day, run blogs and interact with people with similar interests. While you want to cover all the book reading population of India to as your customers, its physically impossible to advertise so much that you can reach all of them by buying advertisements in websites/newspapers.
The best way to reach this audience is to use viral marketing strategies. Your best customers should become the people who will advertise for you, without you having to pay anything. If you have a happy customer, make him your brand ambassador. Let all your happy customers speak for you on their websites, e-mails and blogs.
In an ideal world you would expect all your customers to do the marketing for you automatically, but in the real world, everyone needs some incentive to overcome the inertia. You can give an incentive to your existing customers with an affiliate program. With an affiliate program, if I get a user to go to sapnaonline from my website and buy a book, I get a 2-5% commission. I can get it as cash or buy books with the money earned by this.
Let me explain the use of affiliate program with an example. Consider an existing customer. He buys a book from you, is happy because you gave him a 10% discount, did not charge him a lot for postage and offered many payment methods. Now, he is very happy and goes and tells a few friends who might or might not remember your website after a day or a week when they really want to buy a book. That’s the end of it. You had a happy customer, but you could not convert that asset into many more happy customers. Instead, suppose you have an affiliate program. With the affiliate plan, each happy customer will put a link on his website/blog, which will help him earn a little revenue, and you don’t have to spend anything for advertising. If you could get very popular book review blogs to include your affiliates program, that should increase your market share by many times. Once you get this system in place, invite a set of most popular blog authors and websites to try it out. This makes a lot of people to ‘talk’ about Sapnaonline and that’s the best advertisement you can get. More your name is on the top of your customers, more likely they will be to buy from you.
Sooner or later, people will figure out that even for buying books for themselves, they should use the links from their own website to get some more discount. This is encouraging that they will keep links on their website and continue giving you advertisement, for free.
You can implement affiliate program in several ways. Enable users to easily get banners of their favourite books and post it on their website (like Flickr badge). Make people to include Sapna’s link in their e-mail signatures. Let people build a list of their favourite books and post it on their website. Let people take pride in being your customers. Also put a list of highest earners of affiliate program on the front page and tell them how much each of the successful people are making. This will let others take the trouble of signing up for affiliate program.
I hope you appreciate the importance of this kind of marketing in this competitive world. Everyone is fighting to get customer’s attention and while some companies still believe advertising is the way, you can make your name the obvious choice for buying books online.

Get rid of shipping charges
I understand that there is at least 20-30% margin on most books. Get rid of shipping charges at least for orders more than say 500 or 1000 Rs. This helps in several ways. People who would otherwise buy about 400 Rs worth of books will now buy 500 Rs worth. But more importantly, shipping charges are a mental block for a buyer. ‘No shipping charge’ will help lot more customers to buy goods from you. If this is financially too costly, you can reduce the discount to make up for it. You are fine as long as you are giving some discount.
Make use of existing customer database
I have signed up for the Sapna newsletter and have got only one mail in last 2 years or so. What are you wasting such a precious resource for? Every fortnight or so send newsletters telling about the new releases, offers, and more importantly the top-10 or top-50 books. People who signed up have voluntarily asked you to send update so that they can buy from you. You don’t get such chances always; use that option. You might have noticed in your retail book-store that people buy best sellers just because they are best sellers in the first place. Use this fact to sell more books online too. The
Top-50 chart will make people buy more. Give exclusive offers to regular customers. Use some kind of loyalty program so that people who bought from you, will buy again.

Make customers come to you not only for buying the book
Design your website so that people can write reviews on books they have read and rate the books. If its needed, place a reward for writing good reviews too. That way your site will become a place to come for anything related to books. Once people start coming, sooner or later they will start buying things from you. At present I cant come to sapnaonline and do anything other than buying books.

Redesign the website
The current website needs major changes. If you cant get the user interface right, you wont get anything else right. Get rid of all that excessive flash graphics on the home page. Use sober colours like light and dark blue, grey etc. Not everyone likes a bright green website. Flashy websites put off users much more quickly. Nice static graphics with farther spacing and better layout. Consult a user interface specialist if needed. Make it very clutter free and pleasing to mind. Moreover, the site does not render well in various browsers and looks awkward in several window sizes and resolutions. This needs to be fixed.
The Subject/Publisher category menus on the left side are totally useless. When I scroll into a category I am faced with tens of pages full of books. What should I do next? That does not serve any purpose at all. Instead, make the search better. Give more options in the search. For the people who still want to browse by category, make it easier by giving options like ‘latest additions’, ‘highest user ratings’ , ‘Best selling’ etc. Of course, you will have to invest some money in getting the affiliate program part in the website too.

Let people buy through SMS
I don’t know how feasible it is, but let people order by SMS. For example, if I want a book, I SMS the title and/or author. You call me back, get my address, confirm my order, take my payment options etc. Next time I send an SMS, you just confirm my order by SMS because you already know my address and payment details. If there is a significant financial burden, charge people some amount for this. People love convenience and the latest generation wont mind paying 10 Rs for the convenience of getting books/CDs through SMS. In this process you also get a bid database of phone
numbers to which you can send marketing offers.

Keep it simple
I might sound over-emphasizing this fact but user experience and convenience is everything. Keep it simple for the user. All the complexities should be for you, not for the user. Ideally, if a user comes, he should be able to search for a book, click buy, enter payment details, all this with less than 5 clicks. That is possible. But if the user wants to do other things like set up his affiliate account, get a affiliate banner/signature, buy books regularly, read or write reviews, he should be able to do so with few more clicks, again as easily as he can.

Please note that I have used the word ‘books’ extensively the in above paragraphs. I
actually mean ‘books, Music, CDs, Movies and gifts’.

It is one thing to have a very good website but if you are not able to connect to your customers, you cant sell much. The whole purpose of this write-up is to help you better connect to your customers. I might have sounded rude sometimes, but that’s only because I feel that a very good chance is being wasted. I have also tried to retain this write-up as short as possible so that you can quickly see the merits of these ideas. Once you like the ideas, its much easier to work out the minor details.

Why I am offering these suggestions
While I have no formal education or experience in business, I am very interested in understanding and thinking about businesses. I am planning to start a company in future. I can not start it now due to personal reasons but I want to use this time to build my experience of doing business. By offering these suggestions to you, I want to see the effect of my thinking on a businesses. If my suggestions are accepted by you and do work well, I will have the satisfaction with my thinking and confidence with my abilities. I have contacted you first because I grew up reading books bought at Sapna and feel emotionally attached to the brand. If you think you need more details on any of the suggestions, don’t hesitate to contact me.
I would appreciate if you can acknowledge this by a week and let me know your initial reaction. Else I would assume you are not interested.

-Narasimha Shastri

Here is the reply

from :"Jayashree, Sapna Book House"
to :Narasimha Shastri
date : Apr 19, 2007 8:50 AM
subject : Re: Suggestions for your business

Hello Shastri

Thankyou for your valuable Time ,suggestions & interest in sapnaonline. It has always been a pleasure to receive mails from customers about their views & experiences on the site .
We appreciate your ideas & below is our response to them :

We intially started the webiste with an intention of a very simple website just to buy our merchandise . Cross links mostly increases the hits on your site and very negligible amount has been converted to orders , we had intially did an cross links & affiliate programms with a couple of well known sites , but prefered other tools of marketing .

The Shipping Amount charged is a minimum amount considering the cost incurred to door deliver the merchandise , along with offering an 10% flat discount on books & 5% on Multimedias & music . This has proved more attractive for customers who would primarily calculate how much discount they are getting which is the more significance then nominal shipping fee , Travelling to the store would actually prove more expensive . There is an bulkorder link on the right hand side of the homepage where the custoemrs request for bulk orders quotes where many more facilities have been extended to the customers .
We are sending a newsletter / promotional letters / every 15 days , the latest was for the harry potter pre order promotions which has been mailed to all . We would request youto mail us your mail id to check why you are not receiveing mailers we prefer increasing more product line to offer customers & are shortly going live selling kannada books , Ebooks. etc..

We have recently changed the color to the existing Blue green from the Light blue grey color we had previously. We have changed keeping in mind to give the store more vibrant & cheerful look to serious formal look , which most of our customers have appreciated & prefered
Sms would be surely most convenient way & is in our think tank . we are not quiet sure of how soon we can incorporate this but assure will be incorporated .
We appreciate your views and would welcome more suggestions from you

Thanking you
Jayshree - Buss Devp

I finally sent this reply.

from :Narasimha Shastri
to : "Jayashree,
Sapna Book House"
date:Apr 19, 2007 11:55 AM

subject : Re: Suggestions for your business
Jayashree,
thanks for taking time to respond. I am glad to know that you are continuously working to improve your services.
I wish to offer some clarifications in response to your comments.

* I was not aware that you had tried an affiliate program. I am surprised that it did not generate significant sales improvements. I am not sure how it was implemented. I however suppose that it was not like the one I have in mind. I am suggesting that its worth a reconsideration. Amazon has had one since 1996 and apparently they are making significant part of their sales from affiliate program. My suggestions has been inspired by Seth Godin's free online book which you might want to download and read from http://www.ideavirus.com/ .
Currently I dont see any initiative from you that helps a happy customer spread information about you other than orally telling his friends.
* You said cross linking increased hits but not sales. I think you should investigate 'why' people who came to you went away without buying. My theory is that when you get something recommended by a person, you have more chances of buying than being recommended by an ad banner on rediff or indiatimes.

* I very well appreciate shipping fee you charge is very very reasonable. I was suggesting that you jsut get rid of shipping fee even if you have to reduce your discounts to say 8%. Alternatively, you might be able to afford free shipping for orders above 1000 Rs with 10% discount also. I just mean to say 'free shipping' and '10% discount' combined might be the biggest incentive for new customers to start buying from you. Everyone loves a free lunch.

* I dont know why I have only received the recent newsletter with Harry Potter offer. I have not received one earlier. It might be my spam filter. But glad to know that you are sending newsletters periodically. You might want to include the 'best selling' list in that too.

* Its good to know you are expanding product base. I have been awaiting availability of Kannada books ever since the new site came up. Eager to see new product lines.

* I preferred the old colour combination, but may be its only me. I would still prefer if the site layout is little more less-cluttered and the categories menu more useful.

* SMS shopping might be a very exciting thing for both the customers and you. I will
look forward for that too.

I am glad to know that you at least gave my suggestions a considerable thought.
Wish you and your team the best!
Shastri

Now, what do you think? I am sure people at Sapna know more about their business than I do. But do you think the suggestions I made make sense even partially?

Next post on 14th May because I am travelling next monday.

Feeding the hotel

2007-04-22T10:16:00.000Z

Please read my post 'about' Business Ideas before you do anything with this idea.

Idea: Supply chain for hotels and food industry

Story: With the urban population growing, there will be a significant growth of catering industry. This includes hotels, caterers who cater to the needs of corporate customers to name a few. There is currently no established industries to supply this sector with agricultural produce (perishable or otherwise). This is a straightforward idea which is essentially a traditional business but some insights from my thinking.

What will you do:
You sign contracts with catering businesses to provide them with items they need at a 'pre-agreed rate'. You develop a supply chain network to ensure the supply, prices and your profits.

Some notes:

* Currently the catering industry is being served by small resellers who buy goods at local market and deliver them to caterers. Some hotels even manage the purchases themselves through the local wholesaler. The idea is to bypass as many middlemen as possible. Ideally there will be only three people in the picture: Farmer, you and the caterer. (More ideally, there should be only farmer and caterer but then, you will be out of business).

* The biggest rule of the game is economy. You HAVE to be able to pay the highest price to the farmer and ask the lowest price from the caterer. A delayed delivery might be acceptable, so is a consignment of slightly inferior quality. But the moment you charge the caterer more than you should, you are out of business.

* Establish contract farming. That way you will have an easier way to predict prices for future. This will also keep you in good books of farmers. If you cut all the middlemen, you should also be able to give a very good price to your farmers. Here is a success story to inspire you.

* Be nice to both your suppliers and customers. Take neither for granted. Ensure quality, price and reliability for your customers. Ensure good experience, good prices and social incentives for your farmers. Dont be a leacher. Bad publicity can spoil you more than anything. Try to share your profits with everyone involved. Mean no evil and do no evil.

* Reinvest most of your profit to expanding your network. Create a transportation infrastructure, warehousing/coldstorage infrastructure etc as you go along. The bigger you get, the easier the going will be. Dont rest till you handle a significant percentage of supply for catering industry.

* After completing above stage, start thinking of ways to expand your customer base. Think of supplying to food processing industries. Think of exports. The biggest challenge for agricultural exporters from India is that the goods are not traceable to source (Read this interview). With your supply chain, you already have the onshore part for exports working well. think of offshore part now.

* I strongly believe that you can start from very modest investments. You can start with selling only one product (say potatoes for example). Give good quality, ensure delivery and price and you are in business. Build trust and expand rapidly into everything else.

* Hire good people. If there is anything lacking in Indian agriculture industry, its good people. All the people at APMCs, Middlemen, Transporters, Wholesalers, Retailers are inadequately talented to think. Most dont bother about anything other than money. If you can hire people who mean business and are willing to develop their communities into better places in the process, you can stand out of the crowd and win markets and hearts.

Hurdles:
There are many. Otherwise someone else would have done it already. But the silver lining is that its the best time for you to get started. Given the socio-economic state of India now, most of your hurdles can be overcome.

* Agricultural sales in India are governed by APMC laws which make it illegal to buy directly from the farmer. You might be forced to buy directly at APMCs to start with. However with companies like Reliance, Metro etc trying to lobby for more direct access to farmers and you should benefit too.

* There will be an entry of giants like Reliance into this sector sooner or later. Competition is expected but might or might not affect you directly because they might concentrate more on retail and exports. The risk of competition only means that you are doing things which others also think is feasible.

* One more significant factor is that most of these middlemen currently operate beyond the income/corporate tax network. They pay almost no tax. You as a 'proper' business will be forced to pay the tax that might make it much more difficult to compete in terms of price. This is a challenge you can overcome with clear and sufficient planning, accounting and vision.

Having said that, I must say I have a strong belief in this model. I have seen such businesses do fairly well abroad and cant see why cant they work for India.
Wish you all the best!

Next week (30th April): How to sell books online in India

Setting Hire Standards

2007-04-16T09:23:00.000Z

Please read my post 'about' Business Ideas before you do anything with this idea.

Idea: Renting house made easy
Gist: Provide user friendly 'real estate agent' services for urban Indian population

Story:
Irrespective of who you are, chances are that you have let or rented a house at least once. If you have done so in any of the Indian cities, you know how messy this can get. This idea proposes a business that replaces the unprofessional real estate agents.

How it will work:
You will contact the owners of the house and get permission to rent out. You can take digital photos etc and maintain a serachable 'user friendly' website. You can also run the traditional news-paper ads etc. After the customer contacts you, you take care of everything, starting from arranging a visit to the property to getting all the papers signed. You get a brokerage.

The difference:
Above paragraph might sound like a typical real estate business to you. It is. But what will make you stand apart is not WHAT you do it but HOW you do it. Here are few things that make you stand out in the existing crowd.

* Never charge the landlord. Not a single penny. Landlords agreeing to let you rent out their house is key factor for your success. If they dont want you, you have no business. Keep in mind that landlord owns the property not you. Landlord is making a favor by letting you do business; not the other way round. This point also serves the purpose that there is a clear value proposition for the landlord compared to the existing system of one-month rent to be given as commission. That will attract more landlords to your system and hence you gain control over more houses.

* Make sure you have a very good if not perfect legal contract system with the tenant. Tenant pays the rent in advance for the month and pays it preferably through a standing instruction to his bank. Tenant pays for whatever the things he broke. Tenant leaves the house exactly as it was when he occupied it; else he pays. These should not stop a normal tenant from coming to you since these are more or less existing terms and conditions and they wont bother a customer who knows for sure that he can take care of the property well. This is one more reason why you could be the owners' pet boy.

* Make it hassle free. Totally. You should not require more than two meetings of your staff with the owner; one for giving the house to you for renting, one for signing the contract between tenant and landlord. The tenant should not be bothered for anything other than seeing the house and signing the contract and giving the payment details. Give them peace of mind. Dont do anything like what those credit card guys do. Have you recommended a credit card to anyone ever? Me neither.

* Very good customer service. No compromise on this. Create a call and mail support system and put your best people in there. Make the phone number Toll free. Things can go wrong and will go wrong. What you do when things do go wrong will set you apart from others.

* Charge the tenant one month's rent or less. You should never ever exceed the existing commission rates, whatever additional value you give. Money speaks and there is a significant fraction of people who buy things based on absolute price of the product rather than its value.

* Device viral marketing strategies. Make it a policy that you will accept customers only by introduction by existing customers. Limit the number of new customers that an existing customer can introduce. Make it sound like its a privilege to be your customer. People will take pride in introducing their friends. Remember the pride you had when you first sent a gmail invitation to your friend? [As a related strategy, you can offer small commissions to 'introducers' making it sound interesting. But I have not yet been able to think if its worth it at all. For now, I think if you are good enough, people will talk about you to friends any way]. Read Seth Godin's free e-book on this to get some ideas.

* Make your name a synonym for renting a house. Choose an appropriate name. In case of India, make sure your name makes sense in most languages. To popularise yourself, place a board 1' x 1' at every property that is let by you or is to let. Make sure that this board is designed by a professional, not your next door painting guy. This will be your trademark and this will the image people will remember you by. Some people remember words (your name) and some the images (your 1' x 1') board. Make sure both types of people can easily recollect you.

* As time progresses, keep updating the standards and make sure that everyone knows. For example, one fine day you say an existing phone line is a minimum requirement for a house to be offered by you (see next point to know how to do this). After about a quarter, announce that you are giving furnished house as an option. Then one fine day say you are going to give free broadband to all your houses. You get the drift. The whole point is to sound (and be) like you are really interested in helping the customer and you consistently set higher standards. That will make you a favourite company that people love to love. The challenge is how you do this without hitting your landlords or your bottomline. See below.

* You dont have to spend money to set higher standards. And no, you cant make the landlord pay. Here is where your partners come in. Go to a telecom supplier, say Bharti, and tell them you want to give phone lines to all your houses. Tell them you wont pay them any installation charges, nor your landlord/tenants will. But tell them they will have exclusive rights over that household for two years. Any telecom company with right mind will accept this. Believe me, the installation charges are not that big. They can easily recover the money if you ensure loyalty. Similarly make someone renting furniture (like Saleh Ahmed in Bangalore) a partner. Ask him to give a discount to your customers. Then after an year convince the telecom provider to give three month free broadband trial to all your houses. [I am sure you can figure out rest of the things here]. The warning here is you should never expect any financial gain from your partners either. You are making an investment to gain goodwill among tenants and they are the only ones from whom your money should come from.

I am sure you can come up with more things to do but in my opinion, you should always stick to these values
* Never charge the landlord
* Give quality service and improve them constantly
* Never let any party feel they are tied up. Be very flexible to meet everyone's needs. In the long term this would pay off.
The moment you compromise on this, you will not be different from anyone else and you lose.

Why this will work:

If you have read this far, you already have a feeling that this will work. It will work because in India the customer as well as the landlords are better aware and want the best of the services to be offered to them. There is none currently. This wont work in US or UK or Europe because there are already too many people doing this. The way India is progressing, urban housing will be a very huge opportunity and there is lot to be done as a middleman. I dont have the numbers but I think you can easily grow as big as a rental agency can get and then to much more. Think of the ways you can expand your services to selling etc.

Why this might fail:
The biggest reason this can fail is the real estate lobby. There is a big number of people with shady connections with underworld in this business. The moment you start hitting their bottomline, they might want to settle it off with you. But the brighter part is that these sharks are usually out of domestic lettings because of the relatively smaller money involved. The people who might give you headache are the local gundas who till now used to own their respective ares' renting business. One way I think of overcoming this is to try to bring them in your network too. While I am yet to come up with a value proposition to convince someone who has been getting two months rent for every house let to accept a job as a 'business development manager', I am pleasantly titillated by imagining a rowdy wearing a necktie and calling everyone sir and madam and trying to be polite. On a serious note, I think a decent job might be more inviting than a higher income rowdying for most such people. They went to that road because they had no other choice available. I feel they can change. Seen the number of eve-teasing cases dropping in Bangalore lately? Thats because BPO industry employed all those who were otherwise unemployable and spent their energy on things like eve-teasing, or so I think.

Some ball-park numbers:
To create a software system that can handle your requirements and organise all your transactions: 1 500 000 INR
Setting up office infrastructure and hiring people: 1 000 000 INR
Typical commission on letting a house: 6 000 INR
Typical expense for letting a house: 2 000 INR
(The numbers are off my mind but should help you do the math).

And what did I think right and what did I think wrong? Please tell me in comments. Lets all learn.

Next Monday: Feeding the Hotel! 23rd Apr 2007

Business Ideas

2007-04-16T09:11:00.000Z

This is about the ideas I am going to share through posts on this blog.

If you liked the idea and want to develop it, ask me nicely and I will give it to you, for free. Yes free. (although I would not mind a profit share if you succeed). I am a nice guy otherwise so ask me nicely and I will oblige. If I find out that you stole my idea, I will sue you. Seriously. If you want to send an idea to someone, include the original link. That way I remain as the connecting point for all these ideas and can warn you if someone has started working on the idea before you sink in your savings.

Sorry that was rude but I had to make myself clear.

Now, whats in it for me? Why do I write these? Because I want to use this space as a colouring book for ideas that are close to my heart. A place where I can think about ideas that would otherwise die off and see the merit and demerit of each. I have a few ideas that I want to work on. I wont reveal them here for obvious reasons. This is a sandbox for me to learn from you the things that are missing in my thinking. Thats what is in it for me.

Most of these are ideas relevant to India and to an urban population. Some might be internationally feasible. These are not the kind of ideas that would make you a Google overnight. Some might not be suitable for attracting a VC fund while some may be. Some might need a lot of investment while some might be happy with your garage to start with. Some are cutting edge and some might be age old trades with a 'O Henry' twist in the tale. The idea will like you based on what kind of a person you are.

I plan to write about all the ideas that come to my mind and which I think I can share. This means that I cant assure you how often I can write. I am aiming for atleast two ideas a month to start with but dont know if it will grow or diminish as we go later. Let me give it a shot anyway.

Excuse me for my use of relatively non-business language. I am neither formally educated in business nor have read as much as I should.

If you want to share your idea here, drop me a note.

And finally, dont send me an e-mail asking me to introduce you to Sequoia or Ambanis. I dont know them either.

Bad and the good news

2007-02-28T14:31:00.000Z

Bad news.

BBC says wind blew away a Chinese Train! We all have a grouse or two about the build quality of Chinese products, but if you ask me, this goes little too far. I can imagine a wife telling her commuter husband "go little easy on baked beans Xanzou, dont you want to reach office in an un-burst railway coach" ?

I wonder what next? Flying buildings? Come to think of it, the only thing they built strong enough was the wall. Good they stopped short of building the roof. Or we could be reading headlines like 'earthquake in china causes roof to collapse, killing trillion people' or 'collapsed roof causes stampede at Pearly gates; 2000 people die again'.

Die again? they say sometimes dying once is once too many.

Well, talking of baked beans, scientist have recently discovered that (surprise surprise!!) they cause.. errr.. intestinal gases. I wonder what took them so long. Did they have dead rat stuck up their nose all these years?

The gases are apparently so inflammable that several people have had third degree burns when the previous guy left a burning stub in the toilet. Have you ever seen a Hollywood movie where they show a giant fireball behind the Hero and wondered why is it always BEHIND the hero? Because, according to the Matrix, 'he is the one'.Now they even hire pyrotechnic experts who can run on baked beans after California imposed strict laws on polluting air with lead compounds.

When I first read up about lead compounds, I thought they must be terribly important on the lines of lead actor or lead actress. Later did I realise that lead actors were not all that important thanks to Malashri who claimed that even if a monkey was cast opposite her, the film would be a success.

Monkeys are all not that dumb considering that there are a billions of them running the show on the Internet with one keyboard each. I am just waiting for them to churn out Macbeth.

I love Shakespeare the same way camels love igloos. Igloos are neat little houses that help you keep warm, as long as you can get a camel to arctic to appreciate that. Several people have tried, in vain, not to airlift the camel, but to help me appreciate Shakespeare but they lost me after "Gregory, on my word, we'll not carry coals". Shame on me.. for letting the wrong people help me.

It might be just coincidental, but I somehow see a strong correlation between a man's ability to understand poetry and the length of his beard. Blame it on my profession, but the last engineers I saw with a long beard were Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie. Some say that they created the poetry of C but I am no better in C than with poetry. Some more weird people chose the easy way out and have started writing poems in Perl! See here to believe it.

I wanted to write a poem one day titled 'God is dead'. But I would not know for sure till someone opened the box. Now that someone did, you might soon be hearing the 4th worst poetry in the galaxy.

Well, thats what I think is good news!

[The first three places are already taken. Ref:

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker

Vogon poetry is the third worst in the Universe. The second worst is that of the Azgoths of Kria. During a recitation by their Poet Master Grunthos the Flatulent of his poem "Ode to a Small Lump of Green Putty I Found in My Armpit One Midsummer Morning", four of his audience members died of internal hemorrhaging, and the President of the Mid-Galactic Arts Nobbling Council survived by gnawing one of his own legs off. The absolute worst poetry in the universe was written by Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings of Sussex. Luckily, it was destroyed when the Earth was.

]

Being an Engineer

2006-11-29T10:21:00.001Z

When I was young and impressionable, people told me how great it is being an engineer. They told me I can build things that make lives easier for so many people, make our nation proud and what not. Suffice to say that was enough brainwashing material for me to be tricked into becoming an Engineer. Little did I know that being an engineer is such a miserable thing to do with your life.

Take that laser show in Sentosa Island for example. When everyone around was enjoying the more-real-than-real images of Kiki the monkey and the fairy, I was left wondering how can they project 3D images on water mist using Lasers. Then there was this magic show where the magician was yanking bright balls from nowhere and the crowd was applauding. Of course, I was wondering what sort material can make balls that can be compressed to a small size then be popped up.In the end I was a more educated man knowing how to project laser beams and that you can compress sponge to real small sizes. But I missed all the fun. I missed the moments to marvel at something just because I was trained to 'find out how it works'.

We engineers are like that. We cant move on without wondering (and finding out) how does the damn thing work. I have been in all those situations a normal person will never be in. Like trying to look underneath an aircraft toilet just to find out how does the vacuum flush work. And yeah, I took great joy in repeatedly flushing and listening to the 'whoosh'. (This is surely not bad considering that the average passenger flushes less than once per use of toilet).

We also spend a significant of time worrying about alternatives. The whole life for us engineers consists of blocks of things and methods, where each block can have any number of alternatives. We wonder whether to buy a diesel car or a petrol one. We worry if we should travel during the night or day. I once wondered if we could 'blow' and candle out, why cant we 'suck' the candle in? I learnt that it is very much possible, at the cost of severely burnt lips!

Related to above point, we want to think before spending. Its not about money really. Its about optimising the use of it. This is good when you are buying alloys to build an aircraft but most of us engineers cant take it out of our brains even when we are buying grocery. We wonder if it is worth all the money spent on petrol to go to the discount shop. To put it in 'engineerese' every buying decision is a multi-variant optimisation problem.

We are really geeky and we really miss a lot of fun due to that. I bet 90% of us will first pick up the technical catalogue of a new Pirelli tyre and only the remaining 10% of us would have even noticed the Pirelli http://www.pirellical.com calender lying next to it. I rest my case.

Another significant part of our useful life goes into reading the manual for things that we buy and doing exactly the same things the manual warns us against. No engineer got a gadget that has enough features and we always feel the need to tweak the turn the knobs that are beyond access to the lesser mortals. That is another few thousands lost on void warranties, chipped nails and cut fingers.

We spend a lot of effort in getting smart and lot more effort in showing off that we are. Its a high standard to keep up to you see! We have huge egos and when someone says something is impossible, we want to try it just for the heck of it. I am sure we all engineers should be thankful to Alexander the great for cutting the Gordian knot and finishing it once for all. Else all of us would be trying to outsmart each other with our own non-linear Finite Element based spatial analysis tools to untie the knot. We show off and act smarter than we actually are. See the above sentence and use of extensive links all through this post. You get the drift don't you? That again is too much effort going into nothing useful.

And we are the kind that assume everyone is equally geeky. I have heard of instances where engineers were hit with saucepans and other assorted kitchen equipment for being too geeky at home. We always use a language that takes a higher degree in engineering to understand and we feel proud about it. I presume most readers of this post will be engineers.

So what I am saying is my Engineering education robbed us off a lot of pleasurable moments in life and we are wasting a lot of time doing things that are no fun just because we have been programed to do those things by our education.

But then, there is a brighter side for everything you see. You don't have to worry about what to gift us for our birthdays. A good screwdriver kit is always appreciated!

False sense of pride

2006-09-26T07:46:00.000Z

Why are we so keen on taking pride? Sometimes even when it does not belong to us?

Ask any Indian about Haragobind Khorana. The most probable answer is that he is an Indian Scientist who got a Nobel Prize. When I read a chapter about him in my 4th Standard text book I kept wondering how exactly Dr. Khorana is an Indian. After all, he was born in present day Pakistan and migrated out of the country before Independence. As far as I know, he is even an American citizen. I wonder what justifies the claim that he is an Indian.

And now, don’t get me started about Kalpana Chawla. I truly respect her achievement to become an astronaut. But that’s what she was. An astronaut. Why don’t we stop it at that? Just because she died in a shuttle mis-hap does not make her an icon of Indian woman. I heard some 'beauty queen' talking reverently about Kalpana and how she is a role model for Indian women. I wish her speech-writers had thought of someone better, like Lalita Gupte . In my personal opinion Kalpana Chawla's achievements did not make India any better than it already was. She chased a personal dream and succeeded in it (well, partially). And yes, she left India long ago and was an American citizen too. Oh I am digressing, yeah, what I was saying is we should not be 'very' proud of Kalpana Chawla.

Of course we have double standards for that too. We want a share of fame of Dr.Khorana as well as Mother Theresa. I wonder how many of us know Mother Theresa was born in Macedonia. I am not saying she is not an Indian. She very much is. But why on this earth do we want to bask in her glory? I think our only 'greatness' is that we provided her with many poor people to serve in the first place.

Dr.Khorana or Kalpana Chawla was only an example. Don’t we read in the newspapers everyday about an Indian scientist making a breakthrough elsewhere? What about all those spelling-bee and Math Olympiad champs of Indian origin? Agreed, they were born here. But that’s where our claim on their fame ends. Whatever is their achievement, that should be duly credited to the country that provided them opportunity. We (in some cases) helped nourish the talent but that’s it. In face I would personally feel sorry that we could not recognize the talent and let some other country benefit from it.

Funniest of all these is a claim that Aishwarya Rai is a Kannadiga. Her parents are from Mangalore and hence she has a Kannadiga ancestry (not much choice you see). Of course she grew up, schooled and went to build a career all in Mumbai. What is our basis for claiming she is a Kannadiga? That’s is like saying Pakistani's are Mongols. See this (page-2)

Lets be happy that someone, among us, went to make it big. Lets ponder what is it that made them go elsewhere and what can we do to prevent that from happening again. Lets stop claiming ownership on the bird that once nested on our roof.

Which one is your favorite case of pride in the wrong place? Let me know in comments.

PS: While we are at it, making Kalpana Chawla a heroine was a lot better than making Princess Diana one. She was just a high profile woman who died early. I know she fought against land mines and AIDS but we all know that’s not the reason her death was mourned so much.

Messenger angels

2006-09-19T07:41:00.000Z

I must give it to them. Their unyielding optimism, dedication and experiments with human psychology. They have been going full steam despite all the wars that have been waged against them. They have been trying for ages to cure all the miseries of human race but still are faced with tremendous resistance from their fellow human beings. I pity them.

I am talking about none other than the spammers who so often try to give you one last chance through your mailbox, blog, phone, whatever.

First of all, I commend them on their altruistic nature. I keep hearing from the Nigerian guy whose rich relative died and how he can help me make some quick money. I really appreciate his willingness to share wealth with some stranger. You would appreciate it more when you realise that he and I can not even pronounce each others names. I wonder what it would take me to offer half of my fortune to some Eskimo guy.

Then there are some of them who tell me how to meet your dream partner. They tell me all about dating/matrimony sites. I think they know life can be easier when you have a soul mate. They just want to make sure I don't suffer due to my ignorance. But then, what if you are happily married with your soul mate (like I am)? No problems, just click that small link at the bottom of the mail and they wont send you dating mails ever again. May be divorce lawyer links but no more dating links. I guess that's fair.

Now tell me what causes global wars? Rage of course. And studies have shown that sex helps people calm down. So more sex means more peace. This is the operating mantra of all those spammers who can provide various contraptions, snake-oil lotions and other mystery medicines that help you grow relevant body parts and have more carnal pleasure. What a noble thought I would say. Do you think they send mail indiscriminately? They don't. They always send me the stuff that is relevant to a male homo sapien so I can assure you that they took troubles to find out my gender. Yes, there is a 50% statistical chance that they can be accurate no matter what, but that's a different story altogether.

The next biggest thing that's troubling humanity is poverty. There is a simple solutions spammers found for that. Make everyone buy stocks that are sure to sky-rocket. That's the reason they send me so much info about buying penny stock. If you just listen to them, everyone can be a millionaire. See, everyone in Zimbabwe is now so rich that they use currency notes instead of toilet tissue. If a mere inflation rate of 1000+% can make people so rich, picking good stock early can beat it any day. Its a different matter that I could not buy any stocks because 1. I did not have enough money 2. the mails actually contained gibberish. May be if I was smart enough to understand that gibberish, I could pick good stock myself. But its the intention that counts.

Overall, I feel very bad that the human race overall misinterprets the true intention of a spammer. What more, companies like Google are devicing programs that claim to stop spammers for ever. Talk about shooting the messenger dove.

I almost thought I will take that 'word verification' thingy from my comments but I know all you guys who don't appreciate spam will spam me.

Catching the slippery one

2006-09-08T06:45:00.000Z

I often get stuck in traffic jams on my way to work. On those days when I am too tired to hold the book in the bus, I look out of the window to see if I can figure out the reason for the traffic jam. The first reason of course is that there are too many vehicles that come in too many varieties (as I wrote earlier). Obviously!! But the second reason is that there is always some moron or the other who tries to do something spectacular, like going on the wrong side of the road, crossing the yellow line or something and then the whole traffic collapses into a catastrophic chaos.

I must admit I have had my share of jumping the red light, over taking from the wrong side etc. But as always is the case, I never get caught. Exactly! If I was caught the first time I jumped a signal or parked in no parking, and penalized heavily, chances are that I would never ever do it again. Believe me, I have lived in Singapore. The fine system works just fine.

So now we have a solution that makes the traffic a bit more streamlined and lives a bit more safe. The solution is to catch the violators and fine them heavily. Easier said than done. The biggest problem is that there are not enough resources with the police to man every junction, watch every yellow line.

That is where yours truly will apply his extra-ordinary brain powers to come up with a solution.

The solution is as simple as it sounds. Just privatize the traffic regulation.
How it works is, I - being a private contractor- take up the ‘rights’ to monitor certain area, say M.G road (the same way BMP used to auctions parking lots). I pay the government certain money for giving me the right. Then the government tells me “see, you can go catch and fine all the people out their risking their and others lives, but you can not fine anyone without first having a photo/video of them violating the rule”. Then I invest some more money to hire people, equipment (traffic cameras, speed radars etc). Then I go install the infrastructure on MG road and I will record on my camera every guy who crossed the yellow line or jumped the signal or the like. I catch that guy at the next junction, and tell him ‘Dude, we have you on the tape crossing the yellow line. That would be 2000 Rs fine. Will that be fine?’.

Now do you see how it works? The government is happy because it gets more revenue than before. The contractor is happy because he makes more money than he invested, the police are happy because now they can concentrate on really important things like channeling traffic to help VIPs go to a dinner party, the average commuter is happy because the traffic is smoother and he know he cant be implicated without genuine evidence. The only person who feels sad is may be the guy who paid those 2000 Rs. But 4 out of 5 is still a good score.

What do you think?

Astrology: Why its no science

2006-09-06T08:59:00.000Z

I know this topic has been beaten to death; I know I am not going to convince anyone to think different that what he/she was earlier. But still I have to write this post. Just because I want to consolidate my ideas on why I don’t think astrology is a science.

Disclaimer here: I have nothing against people who 'believe' astrology. People can believe in whatever they want. Be it astrology or ghosts or transporting people through light beams. What I am against is the idea of trying to back up a belief by allegedly scientific theory.
(I would mostly be talking about Indian astrology since that’s the area that I have had opportunity to study to a good extant).

OK lets get started. What they say is in bold and what it actually is in normal font.

Astrology is very closely linked with Astronomy, which is undoubtedly an accepted science.
Astrology is as close to astronomy as alchemy is to chemistry. Starting from the same point does not essential make two things correct. The closest astronomy comes to astrology is in predicting eclipses. That is because the equations involving the relative positions of sun moon and the earth have been established well long ago and they come with correction factors. But what do you say of Makara Sankranti? It is supposed to be the winter solstice day right? And we all know the winter solstice is on December 22nd. But how does Makara Sankranti always come on January 14th? That’s because the astrologers have not applied corrections from last 2000 years!! And you expect me to believe in a prediction based on an equations that has been outdated for 2000 years? This is only the tip of the ice burg. I have seen the almanac and found that the positions of the planets as predicted by it are totally off too. You still insist it is accurate?

There is an unknown force that affects our lives
Ah, it had to come. Science does not like ‘unknown’ forces. It does not like ‘mysterious’ forces or materials just because they make things easier to understand. At certain points in history science did assume things such as ‘phlogiston’ and ‘aether’ but was courageous enough to accept and correct mistakes when appropriate discoveries were made to disprove them. The very lack of ability of anyone to isolate or locate phlogiston or aether lead to theories that were more consistent, and meaningful. Any scientific problem can be solved by conveniently assuming some special material or force. Astrology seems to be doing just the same. If astrologers say that there is indeed such a force, the burden of proof lays on them for it to be accepted as a scientific theory. See this unknown force theory decimated here.

Astrology is accurate
No, its not. Period. If it were accurate, then we would not see vague statements like ‘something good will happen to you today’ in the newspapers’ astrology columns. Something good will always happen to everyone every day. Its just that the human mind, when it comes to astronomy, glorifies the hits and ignores the misses. Have you ever been in this situation? I wish to see just one astrologer who can predict to more than 50% accuracy the gender of 1000 people just based on their date of birth. (Not only the gender, any similar attribute will do too). Well, if you know any good astrologer who wishes to take this challenge, you may want to tip him/her off. There is a genuine 1million dollar bet on this here. I am not surprised there is not a single person who passed even the preliminary tests. What more, no two astrologers would ever agree on how to predict a certain thing. There goes all your accuracy.

But then meteorology is not accurate too
Yes, meteorology is not accurate. But the difference is that we know WHY it is not accurate and how it can be more accurate. If you have more powerful computers, more data to compute, meteorology can be more accurate. I have lived abroad where the meteorology departments are better funded and have been surprised at the prediction accuracies. In meteorology, we know what are the direct and indirect factors that cause rain if we know those factors with accuracy, we can predict the whether there will be rain or not accurately. The same does not apply to astrology. We don’t even know what is the link between the plants and our lives. Astrology says “oh, don’t worry about that, it just works. Cant you see?”

Astrology is statistical just like sociology
What they mean is a prediction is not absolute but statistically it true. Something like saying “every second 1.7 children are born in this country” which is not the absolute truth, for there is nothing called 0.7 children, but if you take the mass aggregate, the statement is still true. Well, if you want to make statistically correct statements, the there is no need to use astrology. Any simple statement will still do fine. What I would be more interested in astrology to do is to be more specific and provide me with guidance at least as accurate as at 4 PM you have 35% chance of getting injured with a sharp object. This is still a statement that is as accurate as statements in sociology etc and I will be fine with such statement.

All the intelligent guys and famous people believed it
So what? Intelligent people have not always taken intelligent stands. For, otherwise the world would have been much better a place to be. On a more serious note, science does not accept something just because someone said it. The motto of the Royal Society "Nullius in Verba" (Latin: "On the words of no one") means don’t take anybody’s word for it. Scientists accept with all due respect the greatness of Sir Isaac Newton but still point out that he was wrong on most of his stands including the one on light. Nobody in the field of science ever said, “hey Newton believes in corpuscle theory of light so it must be true”.
As far as the famous people believing it, I don’t think I need not say anything about their rational abilities after you have seen SRK in the Lux ad ;)

Out ancestors were much smarter than we were so they must be right
Well, if you ask me, it’s a matter of shame to accept that we are stupid. But, if that’s the image you have of your intellectual self, then astrology serves you fine anyway. Yes, out ancestors were very smart people and did things that were outstanding at any time. But again, that does not make everything they say right. I know even of disgusting people who try to support the Sati system just because our ancestors thought that’s a good thing. Wake up folks.

Come on, there are things beyond science
Yes, that’s what science is all about. About studying things that are beyond understanding and to understand them. At this point in time, there is no scientific answer to questions like ‘How this universe was created’ or ‘What is the ultimate nature of matter’. But the strive has been to find out answers to these questions. And again, until you make something understandable, it will not be called science. As again, burden of proof lays on the scientists to support any theory they propose to answer the questions beyond science today and on astrologers to support their claims. It’s a fair game.

I know there is an endless list of sane insane and even fanatic defenses that will be put up by astrology believers. But I am content to type this much. If you are type who believes astrology has science behind it, and has something to back it up, let me know in the comments section. May be we can have a good debate.

In summary, astrology is not a science. If you want to believe in astrology, feel free to do so. But don’t call it a science unless issues raised above are addressed. Thank you in advance.

PS: And yes, I am not even going to talk of palmistry, face reading and the like.

ಸಿಂಗಪುರದ ಬಗ್ಗೆ ಒಂದು ಸಿಲ್ಲಿ ಪೊಸ್ಟ್

2006-08-17T09:26:00.000Z

This post is written in Kannada language and script. If you have problems reading the text here, please visit this Sampada page for font help.

ನನಗೆ ಇದ್ದಕ್ಕೆ ಇದ್ದಹಾಗೆ, ಸಿಂಗಪುರದ ಬಗ್ಗೆ ಮತ್ತೊಮ್ಮೆ ಬರೆಯೋಣ ಅಂತ ಅನ್ನಿಸಿತು. ಮತ್ತೊಮ್ಮೆ ಅಂದರೆ ಈಗಾಗಲೇ ನಾನು ಸಿಂಗಪುರಗ ಬಗ್ಗೆ ಬರೆದಿದ್ದೇನೆ ಅಂತ ಖಂಡಿತ ಅಲ್ಲ. ಈಗಾಗಲೇ ಇಂಟರ್-ನೆಟ್, ಟಿ.ವಿ., ಪೇಪರ್-ಗಳಲ್ಲಿ ಸಿಂಗಪುರದ ಬಗ್ಗೆ ಬಂದಿರೋ ನೂರಾರು ಲೇಖನಗಳಲ್ಲಿ ನೀವು ಒಂದೆರಡನ್ನಾದರೂ ಓದಿರುತ್ತೀರಿ ಅಂತ ನನಗೆ ಗೊತ್ತು. ಆದರೆ ಅವೆಲ್ಲ ಲೇಖನಗಳು ಅಲ್ಲಿಗೆ ೧-೨ ವಾರಗಳ ಮಟ್ಟಿಗೆ ಹೋಗಿಬಂದ ಪ್ರವಾಸಿಗಳದ್ದೋ ಅಥವ ಅಲ್ಲಿಯ ಪ್ರವಾಸೋದ್ಯಮ ಇಲಾಖೆಯವರು sponsor ಮಾಡಿ ಬರೆಸಿದ ಲೇಖನಗಳೋ ಆಗಿರುವುದರಿಂದ ಅಲ್ಲಿನ ನಿಜ ಜೀವನದ ಪರಿಚಯ ಮಾಡಿ ಕೊಡುವುದರಲ್ಲಿ ಅವು ಸೋಲುತ್ತವೆ. ಈ ಲೇಖನಗಳು, ಭಾರತಕ್ಕೆ ಬಂದು ಇಲ್ಲಿನ ಹಾವಾಡಿಗರ, ಮಾವುತರ, ಕೊಳೆಗೇರಿಗಳ ಬಗ್ಗೆ ವಿದೇಶಿಯರು ತೆಗೆಯುವ ಸಾಕ್ಷ್ಯಚಿತ್ರಗಳು ಎಷ್ಟು authentic ಆಗಿರುತ್ತವೆಯೋ, ಅಷ್ಟೆ authentic ಆಗಿರುತ್ತವೆ. ಹಲವಾರು ತಿಂಗಳು/ವರ್ಷಗಳ ಕಾಲ ಯಾವುದೇ ದೇಶದಲ್ಲಿದ್ದು ಅಲ್ಲಿನ ಜೀವನವನ್ನು ಹತ್ತಿರದಿಂದ ನೋಡುವ ಅನುಭವವೇ ಬೇರೆ. ನಾನು ಸಿಂಗಪುರದಲ್ಲಿ ೧ ವರ್ಷ ಇದ್ದೆ. ಆ ಸಮಯದಲ್ಲಿ ನಾನು ಅಲ್ಲಿ ಗಮನಿಸಿದ ಕೆಲವು 'ಅಸಾಮಾನ್ಯ' ಅಂಶಗಳ ಬಗ್ಗೆ ಈ ಲೇಖನ.

ಈ ಬರಹದಲ್ಲಿ ಕೆಲವು ಹಾಸ್ಯಮಯವಾದ, ವಿಚಿತ್ರವಾದ ವಿಶಯಗಳನ್ನು ಮಾತ್ರ ಬರೆದಿದ್ದೇನೆ. ಹಾಗಂದ ಮಾತ್ರಕ್ಕೆ ಸಿಂಗಪುರ ಇದಿಷ್ಟಕ್ಕೇ ಸೀಮಿತ ಎಂದಾಗಲಿ, ನನಗೆ ಸಿಂಗಪುರ ಹಾಗು ಅಲ್ಲಿನ ಜನರ ಮೇಲೆ ಗೌರವವಿಲ್ಲವೆಂದಾಗಲೀ ಭಾವಿಸಬೇಡಿ.

ಸಿಂಗಾಪುರಕ್ಕೆ ಹೋಗಿ ಇಳಿದ ತಕ್ಷಣ ನಿಮ್ಮ ಎರಡು ಇಂದ್ರಿಯಗಳು ಅತ್ಯಂತ ಚಕಿತವಾಗುತ್ತವೆ. ಕಣ್ಣು ಮತ್ತು ಮೂಗು! ಸ್ವಚ್ಛ ಥಳಥಳಿಸುವ ರಸ್ತೆಗಳು, ಮತ್ತು ಸುತ್ತಲಿನ ಹಸಿರು ಕಣ್ಗಳಿಗೆ ಆಶ್ಚರ್ಯ ಮತ್ತು ಸಂತೋಷ ತಂದರೆ, ಅದೇ ಕ್ಷಣದಲ್ಲೆ ನಿಮ್ಮ ಮೂಗಿಗೆ ಅಡರುವುದು seafoodನ ಮತ್ಸ್ಯಗಂಧ. ನೀವು ಮೀನು ಮಾರ್ಕೆಟ್ ಹತ್ತಿರ ಮನೆ ಇದ್ದು, ಅಲ್ಲೇ ಹುಟ್ಟಿ ಬೆಳೆದವರಾಗಿದ್ದರೆ ಪರವಾಗಿಲ್ಲ . ನಿಮಗೆ ಏನೂ ವ್ಯತ್ಯಾಸ ಗೊತ್ತಾಗದೆ ಇರಬಹುದೇನೊ. ಇನ್ನು ಅಥವ ಮೀನು ಪ್ರಿಯರೋ ಆಗಿದ್ದರಂತೂ ಬಿಡಿ. Full ಮಜ. ಇಳಿದ ತಕ್ಷಣ ಬಾಯಲ್ಲಿ ನೀರು (ಅಥವ ಹೊಟ್ಟೆ ತೊಳೆಸುವಿಕೆ). ಸಮುದ್ರದ ಮಧ್ಯದ ದ್ವೀಪವಾಗಿರುವುದರಿಂದ ಮೀನು, ಸೀಗಡಿ, ಅಕ್ಟೋಪಸ್, ಸ್ಕ್ವಿಡ್ ಮುಂತಾದ ಸಮುದ್ರದ ಚರಾಚರ ಜೀವಿಗಳೂ ಇಲ್ಲಿ ಸುಲಭ ಲಭ್ಯ. ಇದರ ಮೇಲೆ, (ಕೆಳಗ ವಿವರಿಸಿದಂತೆ) ನೀವು ಎಲ್ಲೇ ಹೋದರೂ food courtಗಳು. ಒಟ್ಟಿನಲ್ಲಿ ರಸ್ತೆಯಲ್ಲಿ, ಮನೆಯಲ್ಲಿ, ಬಸ್ಸಿನಲ್ಲಿ, ಮಾರ್ಕೆಟ್‍ನಲ್ಲಿ ಮತ್ತು of course ಹೋಟೆಲ್‍ನಲ್ಲಿ 'ಪ್ರಾಣ-ನಾತ' ! "ಎಲ್ಲೆಲ್ಲೇ ನೋಡಲಿ, ನಿನ್ನನ್ನೇ ಕಾಣುವೆ". ನೀವು ಮೀನಿನ ವಾಸನೆಗೆ ಕಟ್ಟಾ ವಿರೋಧಿಗಳಆಗಿದ್ದರೂ ಚಿಂತೆ ಬೇಡ. ಕೆಲವೇ ದಿನಗಳಲ್ಲಿ ನೀವೂ ಆ ವಾಸನೆಗೆ ಹೊಂದಿಕೊಂಡು 'ಎಲ್ಲರೋಳೊಂದಾಗು ಮಂಕುತಿಮ್ಮ' ಅಂತ ಮನಸಿನಲ್ಲೇ ಡಿ.ವೀ.ಜಿ. ಯವರನ್ನು ನಮಿಸಿ ಸುಮ್ಮನೆ ಇರುತ್ತೀರ ಅಷ್ಟೆ!!

ಊರೆಲ್ಲಾ ನಾತ ಯಾಕಪ್ಪಾ ಅಂದ್ರೆ, ಸಿಂಗಪುರದಲ್ಲಿ ಮನೆಯಲ್ಲಿ ಅಡಿಗೆ ಮಾಡುವ ಪದ್ಧತಿಯೇ ಇಲ್ಲ. ಎಲ್ಲರೂ ದಿನವೂ ಬೆಳಗ್ಗೆ, ಮಧ್ಯಾಹ್ನ ಹಾಗು ಸಂಜೆ food court ಗಳಲ್ಲಿ ನೆರೆದಿರುವುದನ್ನು ನೋಡಬಹುದು. ಹೆಚ್ಚಿನ ಎಲ್ಲ apartmentಗಳ ನೆಲ ಮಹಡಿಗಳಲ್ಲಿ food court ಇರುತ್ತದೆ. ಬಹಳ ದೂರ ಹೋಗುವ ಕೆಲಸವೂ ಇಲ್ಲ. ನಮ್ಮ ನೆರೆಯ apartmentನ ಇಡೀ ಕುಟುಂಬದ ಕಾರವಾನ್, ಅಜ್ಜ, ಅಜ್ಜಿ, ಅಪ್ಪ, ಅಮ್ಮ, ಮಗ, ಮಗಳು ಎಲ್ಲರೂ ಸೇರಿ ದಿನಕ್ಕೆ ೩ ಸಲ ಮೆರವಣಿಗೆಯಂತೆ ೮ ಮಹಡಿಗಳನ್ನು ಹತ್ತಿ ಇಳಿಯುತ್ತಿದ್ದುದು (of course lift ನಲ್ಲಿ) ನನಗೆ ಇನ್ನೂ ನೆನೆಪಿದೆ.

ಊಟ ಮಾಡುವುದು ಸಿಂಗಪೂರಿಯನ್ನರ ಅತಿ ಮೆಚ್ಚಿನ ಹವ್ಯಾಸ. ಹಾಗಂತ ನಾನು ಮಾತ್ರ ಹೇಳುತ್ತಿಲ್ಲ, ಅವರೇ ಹೇಳಿಕೊಳ್ಲುತ್ತಾರೆ. ಮಲೆಯ್ ಭಾಷೆಯ 'ಮಾಕಾನ್' (ಊಟ/ಆಹಾರ) ಶಬ್ಧ ಉಚ್ಛರಿಸಿದ ತಕ್ಷಣ ಸಿಂಗಪೂರಿಯನ್ನರ ಮುಖದಲ್ಲಿ ಚಂದಿರ ಅರಳುತ್ತಾನೆ. ಸಿಂಗಪೂರದ demographyಯಂತೆಯೇ ಅಲ್ಲಿನ ಆಹಾರ ವೈಶಿಷ್ಟ್ಯಗಳೂ ಅಗಾಧ ವಿಸ್ತಾರ ಉಳ್ಳವು. ಚೈನೀಸ್, ಮಲಯ್, ತಮಿಳ್ ಮತ್ತು continental ಎಂಬ ಮುಖ್ಯ ಪ್ರಜಾತಿಗಳಲ್ಲದೇ ಜಪಾನ್, ಇಂಡೊನೆಷಿಯ, ಐರೋಪ್ಯ, ದೇಶಗಳ ಆಹಾರ ಕೂಡ ಎಲ್ಲ ಕಡೆಯೂ ಲಭ್ಯ. ಎಲ್ಲ ಒಕೆ ಅದೆನೋ ಯಾಕೆ ಅಂದಹಾಗೆ, ಅವರು ಏನು ಬೇಕಾದರೂ ತಿಂದುಕೊಳ್ಳಲಿ. ಆದರೆ ಆ ಬಾಯಿ ವಾಸನೆಯನ್ನು ತಡೆದುಕೊಳ್ಳುವ ಕರ್ಮ ನಮಗ್ಯಾಕೆ? ಚೀನೀ ಅಡುಗೆಗಳಲ್ಲಿ ನಾನಾ ತರಹದ sauceಗಲನು ಬಳಸುತ್ತಾರೆ. ಒಂದಕ್ಕಿಂತ ಒಂದು ದುರ್ನಾತ ಉಳ್ಳವು. ನಮಗೆ ವಾಂತಿ ಬರುವಂತೆ ಮಾಡುವ ಆ ವಸ್ತುಗಳನ್ನು ಆಹಾರ ಎಂದು ಹೇಗೆ ಒಪ್ಪಿಕೊಂಡು ತಿನ್ನುತ್ತಾರೋ ಎನೋ. ಸರಿ, ತಿನ್ನಲಿ ಬಿಡಿ, ಅವರ ಹಣೆ ಬರಹ ಅಂದುಕೊಂಡು ಸುಮ್ಮನೆ ಇರಬಹುದು. ಆದರೆ ಹಲ್ಲು ಉಜ್ಜಲು ಏನು ಧಾಡಿ ಅವರಿಗೆ? ದಂತದ ಮೈಯುಳ್ಳ, ರೇಶ್ಮೆಯ ಕೂದಲಿನ ಚೀನೀ ಲಲನೆಯೊಬ್ಬಳು ಹತ್ತಿರ ಬಂದು ಮಾತನಾಡಿಸುವುದು ಬಹಳ ಹಿತವಾದ ಅನುಭವ ಎಂದು ನೀವು ಅಂದುಕೊಂಡಿದ್ದರೆ, sorry, ನಿಮ್ಮ ವಿಚಾರ ತಪ್ಪು ಎಂದು ಹೇಳಲು ಬಹಳ ವಿಷಾದಿಸುತ್ತೇನೆ. ಅದರ ಕಷ್ಟ ಅನುಭವಿಸಿದವರಿಗೆ ಗೊತ್ತು. ನಾನು ಸಿಂಗಪುರದಿಂದ ಹಿಂತಿರುಗಿ ಬಂದಾಗ ಬಹಳ ಜನ ಅಲ್ಲೇ ಒಂದು ಸುಂದರ ಚೀನೀ ಹುಡುಗಿಯನ್ನು ನೋಡಿ ಮದುವೆಯಾಗಬಾರದಿತ್ತೇ ಎಂದು ಮಮ್ಮಲ ಮರುಗಿದ್ದಾರೆ. ಅವರಿಗೆಲ್ಲ ನನ್ನ limitations ಈಗ ಅರ್ಥವಾಗುತ್ತವೆ ಎಂದು ಅಂದುಕೊಳ್ಳುತ್ತೇನೆ.

ಒಂದು ರೀತಿಯಲ್ಲಿ ನೋಡಿದರೆ, at least, unofficial ಆಗಿ, ಸಿಂಗಾಪುರದ ರಾಷ್ಟ್ರೀಯ ಉಡುಪು ಚಡ್ಡಿ ಎಂದು ನಿಸ್ಸಂಶಯವಾಗಿ ಹೇಳಬಹುದು. ಹುಡುಗ - ಹುಡುಗಿ, ಮುದುಕ-ಮುದುಕಿ, ಗಂಡಸು-ಹೆಂಗಸು ಎಂಬ ಬೇಧಭಾವವಿಲ್ಲದೆ ಎಲ್ಲರೂ ಚಡ್ಡಿ ಧರಿಸುತ್ತಾರೆ. (ತೀರಾ formal ಸಂದರ್ಭಗಳನ್ನು ಬಿಟ್ಟು). ಇನ್ನೇನಿಲ್ಲದಿದ್ದರೂ ಈ ವಿಷಯದಲ್ಲಿ ಸಿಂಗಪುರಿಯನ್ನರು ರಾಷ್ಟ್ರೀಯ ಏಕೀಕರಣ ಸಾಧಿಸಿದ್ದಾರೆಂದು ಹೇಳಬಹುದು. ಚಡ್ಡಿಗಳೇ ಮುಖ್ಯ ಉಡುಪು ಆಗಿರುವಾಗ, ಅದರಲ್ಲೇ ಸಾವಿರಾರು ವಿಧಗಳಿರುವುದು ಏನೂ ವಿಶೇಷವಲ್ಲ ತಾನೆ? ಬಿಗಿಯಾದ, ದೊಗಳೆಯಾದ, ಬಣ್ಣ-ಬಣ್ಣದ, ಎಡವಿ ಬೀಳುವಷ್ಟು ಉದ್ದನೆಯ, ಒಳ ಉಡುಪು ಕಾಣುವಷ್ಟು ಗಿಡ್ಡವಾದ, ವಿವಿಧ ವಿನ್ಯಾಸಗಳ, strategic locationಗಳಲ್ಲಿ ಕೊಯ್ಯಲ್ಪಟ್ಟ, ಹರಿದ, ಎಂದಿಗೂ ಹರಿಯದ, ಒದ್ದೆಯಾದಂತೆ ಕಾಣುವ, ವಾಟರ್ ಪ್ರೂಫ್ ಆದ.. ಒಂದೇ ಎರಡೇ, ನೂರಾರು ವಿಧಗಳಲ್ಲಿ ಚಡ್ಡಿಗಳು. ಮತ್ತೋಂದು ವಿಶೇಷವೆಂದರೆ, ಮಹಿಳೆಯರು ಧರಿಸುವ ಚಡ್ಡಿಗಳ ಉದ್ದದ ಆಧಾರದಿಂದ ಅವರ ವಯಸ್ಸನ್ನು ಅಂದಾಜು ಮಾಡಬಹುದು. ಹಣ್ಣು ಹಣ್ಣು ಮುದುಕಿಯರು ಮೊಳಕಾಲಿನಿಂದ ಕೊಂಚ ಕೆಳಗಿನವರೆಗೂ ಬರುವ ಚಡ್ಡಿ ಧರಿಸಿದರೆ, ಇದೀಗ ತಾನೆ ಹುಟ್ಟಿರುವ ಮಗು ಏನನ್ನೂ ಧರಿಸಿರಿವುದಿಲ್ಲ. ಮಧ್ಯದ ವಯಸ್ಸುಗಳಿಗೆಲ್ಲ linear intrapolation ಮಾಡಿಕೊಳ್ಳಿ.

ಏನೇನೋ ನೋಡಿ ವಯಸ್ಸು ನಿರ್ಧರಿಸುವ ಗತಿ ನನಗೆ ಏಕೆ ಬಂತು ಅಂತ ತಿಳಿಯೋ ಕುತೂಹಲ ನಿಮಗೆ ಇದೆ ಅಂತ ನನಗೆ ಗೊತ್ತು. ವಿಷಯ ಏನಪ್ಪಾ ಎಂದರೆ, ಚೀನೀ ಮೂಲದ ಮಹಿಳೆಯರ ವಯಸ್ಸನ್ನು ಅವರ ಮುಖ ನೋಡಿ ಗೊತ್ತು ಮಾಡಿಕೊಳ್ಳಲು ನನಗೆ ಕೊನೆಯವರೆಗೂ ಸಾಧ್ಯವಾಗಲೇ ಇಲ್ಲ. ಸುಮಾರು ೪೫ ವರ್ಷಗಳ ವರೆಗೂ ಯುವತಿಯರಂತೆ ಕಾಣುವ ಅವರು ಏಕಾಏಕಿ ಮುದುಕಿಯರಂತೆ ಕಾಣಲು ಪ್ರಾರಂಭಿಸುತ್ತಾರೆ. ನನಗೆ ಒಳಒಳಗೇ ಇರುವ ಅನುಮಾನದ ಪ್ರಕಾರ ೪೪ನೆ ವರ್ಷದ ಕೊನೆಯ ದಿನ ಯುವತಿಯ ರೂಪದಲ್ಲಿ ಮಲಗಲು ಹೋದ ಚೀನಿ ಮಹಿಳೆ ತನ್ನ ೪೫ನೇ ಹುಟ್ಟಿದ ಹಬ್ಬದ ದಿನ ಬೆಳಗ್ಗೆ ಎದ್ದು, ಕನ್ನಡಿಯಲ್ಲಿ ತನ್ನ ಗುರುತು ಹಿಡಿಯಲು ಬಹಳ ಕಷ್ಟ ಪಡಬೆಕಾಗುತ್ತದೆ. ಇನ್ನು ಆಕೆಯ ಗಂಡ ಮಕ್ಕಳಿಗಂತೂ ಬಾಲಾಜಿ ಟೆಲಿಫಿಲ್ಮ್ ಧಾರಾವಾಹಿಗಳಲ್ಲಿ ಆದಂತೆ ಒಂದು ಪಾತ್ರದ ನಟಿ ಬದಲಾದಂತೆ ಅನ್ನಿಸಬಹುದು. (ಸ್ವಲ್ಪ ಉತ್ಪ್ರೇಕ್ಷೆ ಅಂತ ನಾನು ಒಪ್ಪಿಕೊಳ್ಳುತ್ತೇನೆ, ಆದರೆ ಚೀನೀ ಮಹಿಳೆಯರು ಅಚಾನಕ್ ಆಗಿ ವಯಸ್ಸಾದಂತೆ ಕಾಣುವುದಂತೂ ನಿಜ.)

ಸರಿ, ಒಂದು ಕೊನೆಯ ವಿಷಯ ಹೇಳಿ ಈ postನ್ನ ಮುಗಿಸ್ತಿನಿ. ಸಿಂಗಪುರದ ರಾಷ್ಟ್ರೀಯ ಹಣ್ಣು ಡ್ಯುರಿಯನ್ ಅಂತ. ನಮ್ಮ ಹಲಸಿನ ಹಣ್ಣು ಇರುತ್ತಲ್ಲ, ಅದೇ ತರಹ, ಸ್ವಲ್ಪ ಚಿಕ್ಕದು ಅಷ್ಟೆ. ಆದರೆ ಮೂರ್ತಿ ಚಿಕ್ಕದಾದರೂ ಕೀರ್ತಿ ದೊಡ್ಡದು ಅನ್ನೋಹಾಗೆ, 3 ಇಂಚಿನ ಹಣ್ಣನ್ನು ಕೋಯ್ದರೆ, 3 ಮೈಲು ವಾಸನೆ. ಕೆಲವರು ಅದನ್ನು ಸುಗಂಧ ಎನ್ನುತ್ತಾರೆ, ಕೆಲವರು ದುರ್ಗಂಧ ಎನ್ನುತ್ತಾರೆ. ಆದರೆ, 2ನೆಯ ಗುಂಪಿಗೆ ಬಹುಮತ ಇರುವುದರಿಂದ, ಎಲ್ಲಾ ಸಾರ್ವಜನಿಕ ವಾಹನಗಳಲ್ಲಿ ಈ ಹಣ್ಣನ್ನು ನಿಷೇಧಿಸಲಾಗಿದೆ. ಉಲ್ಲಂಘಿಸಿದರೆ 500 $ ದಂಡ. ನಾನಂತೂ ಅದನ್ನು ತಿಂದು ನೋಡುವ ಧೈರ್ಯ ಮಾಡಲಿಲ್ಲ. ಹಾಗಾಗಿ ರುಚಿಯ ಬಗ್ಗೆ ಏನನ್ನೂ ಹೆಳಲಾರೆ. ಆದರೆ ನನ್ನ ಇಂಡೋನೇಶಿಯಾದ ಗೆಳೆಯ ಅದನ್ನು ವಾಚಾಮಗೋಚರವಾಗಿ ಹೊಗಳಿದ್ದನ್ನು ನೋಡಿ, ನೀವು ಬೇಕಾದರೆ ಒಮ್ಮೆ ತಿಂದು ನೋಡಿ ಎಂದು ಕುಮ್ಮಕ್ಕು ಕೊಟ್ಟೇನು.

This post was written using BarahaIME. Its a freeware and does not require me to put this line here, but I am so impressed with it, I encourage you to try it too. Works equally well in about 10 Indian languages!

Mis-Print

2006-08-10T10:52:00.000Z

When I was very young and had just learnt to read, I would look forward eagerly for the newspaper to arrive. We used to live in a very remote part of North Karnataka, there were no local editions or prints, so our copy of Prajavani would travel nearly a 1000 Kms to reach us by 5 PM. All those extra hours, did not make the paper even a bit stale, for we were always looking forward for reading the comic strips, sports and the news I could comprehend at that age.

Newspapers were our only window to the external world apart from All India Radio and BBC world service. Every letter printed over the buff newsprint was taken with utmost respect, we could see younger and elder sections of the local community discussing the issues. English papers were very rare. I would see a glimpse of one when we would visit the district head-quarters once a month. English Papers were so expensive that even the raddiwalas used to give higher prices for English papers.

This went on for a while and then, Times of India happened to Karanataka’s Fourth Estate! It brought down the prices for newspaper to around 1.5 Rs, started printing things that people wanted to hear rather than actual news. And no prizes for guessing that it became the highest selling English daily in Karnataka. I was in college when this had happened and call it peer pressure or just because non-sense is so much more attractive than knowledge, I started reading TOI. As years went on, I gained valuable bits of knowledge from TOI’s pages, which were otherwise inaccessible for me. Some of them are enumerated below.

* I am supposed to know ‘Ritesh and Tanya’ who were enjoying a drink (read alcoholic) . TOI calls them by their first names as if they were India’s most well known people.
* If Prasad Biddappa says something, you must agree. Else you are so cheap/middle-class
* Malya is the protector of Indian Culture. (Remember the sword?)
* All women in Bangalore wear skimpy cloths
* All women in the west roam around in their underwear, yes, even in winter
* Closing pubs at 11 is the single biggest issue Bangaloreans are facing. Poverty, traffic jam and crimes can wait to be addressed later
* Average Bangalorean does not give a dime for his/her virginity
* Lots on tips on what to gift for Valentines day, Fathers day, brothers day, neighbor’s day, friendship day, boys day, girls day, you-name-what-you-want-here day etc.
* Very practical tips about how to get yourself a boy/girlfriend and how can you break up if it does not work out, or if you just got bored and need a change.
* Newspapers are all about gossip, sex, rumors, baseless news and in summary, about complete entertainment.

I had more knowledge on Bangalore’s high class society than anyone even in high-class society would have. I had taken enough nonsense to last me 2 life times so I switched on to The Hindu.

In parallel, Kannada print media has been undergoing a major face-lift too. Thanks to Vijay Sankeshwar, VRL group started Vijaya Karnataka (VK). VK tried to enter the market the way Times of India did non-so-long-ago. They sold newspapers for 1 Re and within a couple of years, they became market’s #1. But the difference was that VK had good content since beginning, excellent columnists, fairly un-biased views and local editions for all major town in Karnataka. The group owned a transport company, so their distribution was better, they took innovative marketing approaches and overall, the reader now had a choice of waiting for the Bangalore(or Hubli) edition for about a day or to get his local edition of VK with his morning cup of tea. Overall, VK enjoyed a healthy respect from its competition and a good loyalty from its readers.

Then Times of India Happened to VK. Times group took over VK group for an alleged amount of 1780 million INR.

My sixth sense alarm was starting to buzz, but I decided to hang on. Few days after the take-over, the front page of the paper came in tabloid format. No serious reasons or novelty behind it; just for the extra appeal. Then VK conducted a huge survey through phone/SMS asking whether the new Lokayukta should raid offices or not. They even managed to coax a statement from Mr.Hegde which was distorted and printed as if to give you the impression that VK’s poll changed Mr.Hegde’s mind. Then they started running advertisements right above the headlines, across the whole page.
I am going to give a serious reconsideration on my loyalty now. May be good old Prajavani with the new format is equally good, sans the bells and whistles that I do not want in the first place.
May be VK will remain true to its original style, or more probably, it wont. I may stop subscribing to VK but the for every reader like me they loose, they can attract another ten who like what TOI sells.
The part that hurts most is that nonsense sells very well.

Additional Reading : Ravi Belegere on VK selling (Kannada Page)

PS: Aditya posted this almost simultaneously and independently. Great minds think alike :)

Mobile Manners

2006-08-01T05:07:00.000Z

I had been putting in 15 hours work days for a while. I missed a lot of sleep and to make up for it, was trying to doze off in the bus on my way to work. It takes at least an hour to reach work. The best thing to do in a bus is to read and the next best is sleep. But when you have fluffy eyes, I guess your priorities change. So there I was trying to get myself 40 winks. (Okay, make it 80). Then I suddenly hear someone’s mobile phone ringing on the highest possible volume. I am startled but quickly compose myself and try not to look too odd. I know that it’s a lady’s phone that’s ringing. I wait for her to pick up the phone. No, she just lets it ring for about 5-6 rings with the volume ramping up steadily. I am like ‘okay, we all have cell phones too, now pick up’. As if she heard what I was thinking, she picks up the phone.

I feel very relived and am about to go back to my 7th wink. Then I hear one real loud artificial laugh. This time I don’t startle as much and open my eyes with Herculean effort. No prizes for guessing, it’s the same lady on the same call. Whole bus can now hear this side of the conversation and not that they are all very happy about it. We all wished the lady could reduce the level of her voice. If you liked shouting so much, you could as well have done without the cell phone; the person at the other end almost can hear you without one. The woman is talking in Marathi and unfortunately I happen to understand bits and pieces of Marathi and never before I had felt sorry about it. Now I could make out a bit of what she is talking. It is about her cousin’s son. He is very cute. Good for the cousin. But apparently the cousin’s wife is really mean. She thinks she is the only woman in the world who has a cute kid. And how this caller woman and the person on the other end should be worried about it. Then the topic moves to some more family gossip and allied issues.

I am almost boiling with anger now and considering seriously the option of sounding rude by asking the lady to shut up. Am preparing my lines to make it most polite sounding but most forceful statement. How about ‘Lady, may be you should tone down when you are on the phone’ ? Umm.. sounds too artificial. Well, by that time my guardian angel woke up and the lady hung up for good. I never got to deliver my much prepared dialog. Well, it was anyway too late for me to get back to sleep. One more sleep deprived day was awaiting for me at work.

So much for this particular incident. But it will be an understatement to say I am really pissed off at the mobile courtesy level of people in general. (No, I don’t use offensive language often. Read my earlier posts if you don’t believe me. But this time I am really bugged)

So, borrowing from and adding to Waiter’s this post, some things I want people to keep in mind when they are using cell phones.
* Talk at a normal voice. There is no need to shout. Yes, the other person can hear you well. In fact the phones are so sensitive that the person at the other end can even hear if you whisper.
* Lost connections are a common thing. If you cant hear the other person during a call, then shouting ‘hello-hello’ at the top of the lungs is not going to improve your odds of getting the connection clear. Remain low voiced and if you cant hear them after 5 seconds, cut the call and redial.
* Don’t show off your high end mobile. No, girls stopped getting impressed with your phones long long ago. You are free to buy a mobile that comes with built in camera, radio, music player, home theater system, washing machine, refrigerator, lawn mower and scuba diving gear. That’s all your choice. But don’t think that makes you a great and cool guy. The only thing that can make you look cool is your attitude.
* When you see someone’s latest model mobile phone, don’t jump on it and ask for a test drive. May be some guys are OK with it, but for me my phone is my personal thing and I don’t want a total stranger to rummage through its innards. Ask politely and be sensitive about personal information on the phone
* Don’t send me chain SMSes. I have not forwarded a single SMS that was supposed to bring me good luck and I am still doing fine.
* Don’t send me dirty jokes, forwards, shayris, philosophy of life and other assorted junk. I outgrew them by 2001.
* Free SMS does not mean you have to exhaust them.
* Don’t give me a missed call and expect me to call back. If you want to talk to me, it better be at least worth spending your money on it. If someone is so keen on saving your money, they will cut the call and call you back anyway. Missed calls get to my nerves.
* When you speculate that the other person might be busy, ask him/her if we can talk now or not. Yes, even if its your spouse or the best friend. I have heard people talking from inside toilets.
* Don’t type an SMS when you are talking to someone. If its something urgent, like ‘honey, I will be late from office, don’t wait for dinner’, then excuse yourself from the group and return after sending the message.
* Its totally inappropriate to use the ringer in office meetings. Keep it in silent mode. Don’t use fancy ring tones at workplace. If not you, someone else is trying to think and work and you may disturb them.
* Change ring modes (silent, beep once, loud etc) based on the need. Do change them whenever your environment changes. It is only a small thing that you can do for your fellow human beings.

I can go on and on about this, but I think I you got the drift.
Please be considerate!

Feel free to add your manners tip in the comment section.

Cyanide - Mini Review

2006-07-10T10:07:00.000Z

When was the last time you recommended a Kannada movie to someone? Don't seem to remember doing any such thing? Exactly!
But now all of us who always wanted to watch a good (Commercial) Kannada movie and never got to see one, have reason to celebrate.
Over the weekend I went to watch 'Cyanide'. I had heard good things about it, but was consciously trying to keep my expectations low, lest the movie be a disappointment. But starting from frame one, till the end, the movie never demanded for a lowered bar of standards. It is one of the best commercial movies I have seen in any language. I am sorry I do not have (at this moment) time and patience to write a complete review, but want to share some of the things that set this movie apart from the other run of the mill ones.
* No songs!
* Excellent cinematography. It never becomes too gaudy or music video kind, but at the same time is very dynamic. There are umpteen unique camera angles.
* Great editing. Not an single frame that was not needed for the narration. Very tight editing and makes the script seem like a fast pacer.
* The screenplay is written amazingly well. All the scenes have been meticulously crafted and even though almost everyone in the audience knows the story, it retains suspense.
* Consummate direction. I am sorry I am not aware if director Ramesh was involved with any other project earlier. If this is indeed his first work, then hats off! The whole movie is made with a perfectionists mind. Care has been taken even to the minutest of details.
* Its a docu-drama. It is a very difficult for the director to keep the balance, not glorify anything when dealing with issues that have such political overtones. But the biggest acclaims for the director must go for this very aspect. When you come out of the theater, you empathise with both the sides equally. There is no glorification of terrorists nor the police. Weaknesses of both have been shown in a style that is not demeaning.
* Excellent performances by all actors. Its surely not a 'star' cinema. Its actors' cinema. Rangayana Raghu (Ranganath) and Tara (his wife) have portrayed their respective roles in an outstanding way. Others are very good too.
* Last, but not the least, very good background music by Sandeep Chowta. Don't be surprised if you get the feeling of coming out of a Ramgopal Verma movie.

So you may ask, is there anything bad about the movie at all? Yes, the only bad thing about the movie that it is made in Kannada. For this very reason, its unfortunate that it will not get the response or acclaim it would have got if it were made in any other Indian language. Its time we correct this issue and spread the word.
It is so much meaningful to watch such movies than staging protests against radio stations for saving Kannada. You will never know, this may be one of your few chances to salvage Kannada film industry. Do your bit.

For those who have not heard of this movie at all and want to know a bit about the plot, Cyanide is based on the sequence of events in the lives of the master minds behind assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, after the manhunt for them had began.

How weired am I and How about you?

2006-06-21T06:21:00.000Z

Viky had me tagged on this. This is the first time I have ever been tagged and what better way for a weirdo to be tagged for writing out about his weirdness. I am sure Viky knew I would fit the tab. :) I know I would not look like a 'weirdo from another planet' to anyone on this earth but so will be the claim from a Martian on his planet too. What’s wired to one may make perfect sense to the other. Well, cutting the crap, here I move on to the tag..

Not on the same page: When I am reading a book, I invariably keep the next page ready to be turned. i.e., if I am reading page 212-213, I keep my right hand index finger between pages 214-215. I don’t know how it got started. May be because I read very fast or may be I picked it up while reading a suspense thriller and did not want to waste a single second thumbing the next page. But the habit stays!

No man's land: Whenever I am waking on a floor that has been paved with tiles etc, I avoid stepping on the line between two tiles. This is true for home/office/shopping mall etc. As again, there is no particular reason for this too. (If there was a reason, we wouldn't call it weird, will we?).

A bit too Froogle: One of my favorite pass-times is to search for things on net, find out their tech specs and prices. Although till date I have not bought a single product from Apple, B&O, Creative, Harman Kardon, iRiver, etc, I can give an authoritative review on the features, design and cost of their product line.

Try before you buy: This one is again on books. Before I buy any book, I always make sure I read at least few pages. I mostly do so on Amazon (alas, I never ordered from them for their shipping costs are bit too high for India). I prefer going to Crosswords bookstore where you can sit and read on for quite some time before the nosey salesman attacks you with the ubiquitous 'May I help you'.

Trivia Mania: I love trivia, more so than the actual useful information. I love giving extremely unlikely searches on Google and I do read up whatever comes out of it. Here is an example search which will make you wiser about one of the aspects of human history.

Oh... I am already at 5. So soon? What about the other ones? Like moist eyes of mine when characters in a movie are going through hard times? Like smelling everything I get my hands on? Like always taking the upper berth in a train? Like always using the number keypad to enter the numbers?... hmmmm, may be for the next tag ;)

And here are the people whom I would tag.
* Aditya
* Hardu
* Anand
* Reserved(1)
* Reserved(2)

[ The tags are optional. I dont want you to feel obliged :) ]

Landing feet first

2006-06-20T09:55:00.000Z

One small post I wish to use as a personal update.

I was switching jobs and went through a chaotic weekend finishing personal work, getting relived at the old office and getting into the new one. Man, how disoriented you can get!!

I am happy that I finally managed to land myself feet first and head up than the other way round.

I dont expect to hear that I was missed here ;) but I had few comments pending to reply and of course the Tag vicky had put me on. Will take them up now though!

Hope to get back on all the tracks of life soon.

Foodie NIEan

2006-06-09T10:14:00.000Z

Came across this nostalgic post from Anu about Mysore and Viky's interesting comment on the post. I almost tasted these things in my mind and wanted to post an article I had written about eathing joints of an NIEan on TheNIE.com . Here is the reproduction of the article.

Sometime ago, I was talking with a junior of mine and we invariably ended up discussing about the eat-outs that had gotten interwoven with our existence at NIE. Just occurred to me that I can write up an article about the eat-outs, make you all nostalgic ;)

OK, I am just listing down (in almost no particular order) the places that managed our voraciousness. I am only covering a time window of 4 years (1997-2001) {my earlier stay between 1987-1991 did not allow me to eat out that often} so I am sure I will not be covering places that existed before or the places that came up in last few years. Disclaimers apart read on and remember your favorite food joints!!

Chai shop: now, now, you will surely agree that this HAS to take the first place. The default place to go to if you have just bunked a class or have been kicked out of it by a strict lecturer. I was not a frequenter there (that’s because I could not bunk the classier because I would not come to the college in the first place for most mornings. Well, that’s a different story altogether) so I can not speak about this authoritatively. one interesting thing I know about this place is that (see the archives of this site ) earlier, you could order any fraction of a drink here, each portion of a different drink. I mean you could order 2/3 drink one portion tea, the other coffee and the remaining one milk!!

Kuku’s : Situated just out of the boy’s hostel. You could enjoy bread-omlette or a ‘verki’ or something else with sweet tea enjoying the stench of the gutter next to you and appreciating the scenic beauty of Ashokapuram

Anuty’s juice shop: what happens when great quality meets great hospitality? See that in this juice shop in the Sterling Theater complex. I think nobody remembers the original name of the shop. It was just the Aunty’s juice shop. I still remember the thick mango milk shake. So thick that you will end up ‘chewing’ it instead of drinking.

RTO: grapes juice corner near the RTO office was one huge attraction. There were serious doubts and theories about how on earth that particular juice can be so addictive. Choose your theory but have a drink when you are there next.

Kubera: Boy’s hostels mess on Saturday night (or was it Sunday night?). The hostel mess had a weekly off on Saturday night so this place used to be flooded with the hostel gang.

GTR: Gayatri Tiffin Room, Chamundipuram. The most focused business model I have ever seen. Opens only in morning and evening and was closed on Monday!! What a lousy was to do business you might think. But once you get addicted to the Masala Dose or Goli Bhaji or the delicious coffee, you will go even if he opened only at midnight.

Mahesh Prasad: Recent addition to the food-pilgrimage list. Close to Ballal circle, made good business in a big house converted into a hotel.

RRR: I don’t know what those 3 R’s stand for. But who cares as long as you get the best Andhra style meal in the town? More often than not, you would see Americans and Europeans enjoying food with red faces and running noses. Food in a way is the true global bond transcending nationalities I feel. Located near Gandhi Square if you have forgotten.

Shantisagar: this one we are speaking of was at Kuvempunagar. I remember NIE guys were a major reason they had to convert their unlimited meal into a limited one. Neither food nor service was great but somehow we all had a love-hate relationship. I think he had a very affordable party hall so we ended up having a lot of college parties there.

Dhabas: you would wonder how anyone on this earth could provide food at such a less price. During my days a roti used to cost 2 Rs. There were several on the Bangalore road (Delhi choice, Highway, Pallavi, Greenland etc) each known for its own special dish. None of them were hygienic (not that it mattered) but we would take solace by thinking that any harmful bacteria that might be present would have been incinerated seeing the high flame that was used.

Indrani/Sidhartha/Samrat/Penguin: all these were hotels for small treats you give after you pass an exam or clear some subject you were terribly doubtful about. Located in and around city center.

Roost/Ilapur: these ones are for the real big treats you give when you get your campus job or finish final year project viva. Little heavy on the student pocket but when you have your job at hand, you hardly care ;)

Railway station: well, it figures in this list because that’s among the few places where you could get tea anytime. I still remembers when we (falsely) assumed seriousness during exams and go there to drink tea around 1-2 AM just for the heck of it. It’s a different matter that after having tea, we would come back and promptly go to sleep!!

Okay I think I will stop here for now. There are so many more places that still make me salivate at the very thought but may be I will reserve them for a future article. Why don’t you drop in a couple of lines with your favorite eating joint when you were at NIE? And feel free to add in the places i have missed.

Taxonomy of Bangalore Drivers

2006-05-23T05:47:00.000Z

This scholastic work is a result of time effort and patience lost on Bangalore roads in recent years. However, being the most altruistic soul around, the author gives you liberal rights to distribute this work as you please.

Introduction: If you were living in jungle, it serves your existence very well that you should be able to distinguish between a tiger from hare or may be may be mango from hemlock. On similar lines, when you are living in and driving around, it is in the interest of your survival that you should be able to identify the various types of road creatures and their modes of behavior so that you can plan your offence, defense or escape as required. This work of research aims to provide such insight for a regular person who drives through Bangalore traffic.

For maintaining the clarity, this work is divided by sub-headings of various road vehicles and the psycho and physical characteristics of their drivers. The classifications go in decreasing order of size.
NOTE: This classification is only very broad and only differentiates the major classes. As far as species are considered, each individual driver is one.

Truck drivers: You usually don’t get to see them directly because they sit somewhere at an altitude. You can however identify the cabin crew by a frantically waving hand on the non-driver side. This hand belongs to a crew-member called 'cleaner' and all scholastic efforts till date have failed to decipher the symbolic meaning of these waving. It is however safe to assume that these waving mean 'stay away'. Fortunately the trucks are prohibited from the arterial roads. But you can see them racing each other at 30 kmph and 31 kmph on the ring road. They successfully block the whole width of the road. It is advised that you take them over from left (yes, the wrong side) for, they wont let you pass from the right side anyway. The other advice is to keep away from them.

BMTC Drivers: You can see them from a mile away from the distinguishing color and driving. It can be very dangerous and frustrating to follow a BMTC bus. The bus follows Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and at any instance you can not predict the speed AND the position correctly. One observations that might help the reader is that they always keep right between bus stops and move to left (well, almost) at bus stops. This is the apt opportunity for you to take the bus over and go stuck behind the next one. The drivers can be seen although mostly through the bus's rear view mirror. If you happen to see them directly through their window, be prepared to listen to advice (varies from motherly, fatherly to ultra indecent) for having taken them over in a dangerous fashion. While a normal bus can easily create a road block on any given road, there are special capacity joint-buses (called janTi vaahana) which have an uncanny power of blocking up to 3 roads at a time at a junction.

Cab drivers: Characterized by red eyes, irritable nature, unkempt facial hair, constant honking even at stationary object! They always try to go at 80 kmph, assume the urgency of an ambulance and expect everyone else has less important job. Most of them do not sleep for days together and some of them are trying to compete with David Blain for stretching human limits. The author personally knows few cab drivers who do not have a habitat. They just keep a pair of spare uniform in the cab, eat sleep in the cab and use public bathrooms. Driving style of these indicates that many of them were auto rickshaw driver earlier. However, they still seem to carry the self image of an auto rickshaw and try to squeeze a MUV into the 1 meter gap between any two objects.

Car drivers: characterized by creased foreheads. Having paid through their noses and fighting to pay the EMI, they are obsessive about their cars and want to make sure nobody bumps/scratches their car body. This sits on the mind perpetually and causes those creases on foreheads. Most pitiable class of drivers having the most to lose from the mistakes of other classes of drivers.

Auto rickshaw drivers: Having stood over years as undisputed symbol for rash driving, they are unfortunately losing grounds to cab drivers. (Unfortunate because a rashly driven MUV is more dangerous than a rashly driven auto rickshaw). Auto rickshaws are the vehicles with most diverse speed ranges. They travel at speeds approaching zero when they have no passengers aboard and travel at speed of upto 3x10^8 m/s when a passenger is aboard. Analogous to the belief that "a cat can pass through any hole that is bigger than its skull" auto rickshaws can "pass through any gap that is wider than the headlight". They defy all laws of Physics. A typical auto drive sits with a calm and indifferent attitude of a formula-1 driver just before the race. Based on his age, he is a Rajkumar/Shankarnag/Darshan fan. He feels strongly towards these actors and towards Karnataka and Kannada. In a surprising observation, many auto drivers refuse 1.5 times the meter reading after 10 PM if you are exiting from Ranga Shankara. This is their humble way of commemorating their favorite star who made films like Auto-Raja.

Two wheeler drives: The class in the most advantageous position. They consist of a variety of sub-populations like office goers, salesmen, mothers dropping children to school, college students, neighborhood store owner transporting about 1 ton weight on a moped, whole families of 4-5 children going on an outing etc. They usually mind their own business and do not cause inconvenience to other types of vehicles. They use all possible space on and around the road, including footpaths, medians, drainages, staircases etc and thus enhance infrastructure utilization.

Classification of various other types of vehicles including but not limited to hand carts, bullock carts, horse carts, bicycles, mini trucks, private buses, goods auto rickshaws, tractors, water tankers, garbage trucks, inter-state buses, pilgrimage buses, concrete mixers, sand trucks, driving school cars, mobile advertising kiosks, etc is beyond the scope of this work although there is no doubt that each of them have unique characteristics. The author wishes to conclude with a remark that there is tremendous scope to study to Bangalore traffic further, enhance the underlying pattern and get the best out of it.

More Serious Note: I feel that along with the shear number of vehicles on the road, the diversity of types of vehicles is a huge cause for our traffic woes. With we had a more uniform society and more uniform vehicle population.

Mac

2006-05-19T11:31:00.000Z

Call me biased here, but I must admit I love Macs. From whatever interactions I have had with the Mac Hardware and Software, I have no doubt left in my mind that they are among the best computing devices made for human beings. (Yeah, I know I apparently am contradicting what I said in my previous post , but what the heck, I know Apple is indeed good)

Everything Apple does is so cool and neat. Apple makes even the interiors so neat, not because any user will ever get to see it, but just because Apple knows 'its there'. Look at this image of Apple Quad G5 (courtesy of course Apple)

and of course, the exterior is as cool

Apple does everything well and everything works as advertised.

I will write about why maverick companies like Apple always have a soft corner in my heart; or may be about Apple produces being as much a piece of art as piece of technology.
But now, the ad that made me write this post.
See the complete ad here

One day, when I finally feel I need a good computer and can afford it, you know its going to be a Mac. And now that newer Macs can run XP, try stopping me ;)

Let down

2006-05-16T12:03:00.000Z

No, I am not going to talk about how your jobs, so-called-friends etc can be a let down. I am talking here about the feeling you have when you discover a fact about your favorite piece of literature/music/painting etc.
It kind of triggered of from a series of comments we were having on Shruthi’s blog on this post.

So here is an example.

I was a school kid then and there was this song -does not matter which one I take but lets take- “Akele hein to kya gam hai” from Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak. I bet you are already humming the song. Such a nice tune and then beautiful lyrics. Then I grew up singing the song in every Antakshari where I could start with an ‘A’. But one bright sunny day [just for the poetic touch ;) ] I enter the site www.itwofs.com and find out that Anand Milind have copied it from the track ‘Return to the Alamo' . I am of course surprised. How can this be true? The song sounds so Indian, so Bollywoodish.. this guy must be out of his brains to claim that it’s a copy. Then I hear the sample audio clips there. Then I felt let down!

“Why” I asked myself. What if the song is a copy? It sounds as nice as before. Why should the fact that it was lifted from some song (which I wouldn’t have heard anyway) make me feel I have been let down by Anand Milind?

Then it occurred to me. In the process of liking the song, I have made false impressions in my mind about the composers too. I had told myself “See, I like this song. So I like to composers too. How can I like someone who is not original? So they must be original.” I had become a fan (well, almost) of those composers and was seeing them one level above myself. When I suddenly realized that all they had done was to lift the tune and get it recorded it recorded in Hindi, I felt humiliated. I felt cheated since I had almost become a fan of someone who did not deserve it. That is what causes me to feel I am being let down.

Of course, its not necessary that only the negative things make you feel let down. Look at this example.

There is this wonderful book in Kannada by Poornachandra Tejasvi called ‘Karvalo’. Its one of those books you can read at any age and get perplexed. The author mixes social, economical, cultural, scientific, environmental issues all in one nice novel. The novel is written as if there is a narrator telling you the story in first person. I had been reading the book every two years since primary school. I knew the places and situations in the book are the same place the author lives and same situations he is most likely to encounter in his daily life. So all this while I believed that the whole thing was a true story. Then when I go to college in Shimoga, I find out from my Kannada teacher that this whole thing is a piece of fiction. That very moment I felt my beautiful world of western ghats and flying Lizard have shattered into a piece of fiction. This time I feel let down because this was against the notions that I had held all this while. (This of course is a complement for the ability of the author to make a work of fiction sound so real)

Oh okay, now I get why I feel let down. I feel let down when something you discover forces you to change the notions that you already had intact in your mind.

So the solution is to keep your mind open. Don’t build impressions (good or bad) about people, things, books, songs, music unless you are sure you have all the necessary facts to make build that impression.

I personally want to try living like that. Not that I don’t want to trust anyone and become an obsessive paranoid, I want to reserve the judgment to the right moment of maturity.
I guess it would work.

I am also sure you can easily extrapolate (sorry, thats the engineer inside me) this to relations with people and get rid of lot of heart burn.

NOTE: I also want to take this as an opportunity to introduce to you K P Poornachandra Tejasvi, one of Kannada’s best authors and Karnataka’s best thinkers. He is the son of famous K V Puttappa (Kuvempu) but has made his impression on Kannada literature regardless of his bloodline. He lives in Mudikere near Chikkamaglur and makes a living out of agriculture apart from writing. Most of his published work has plots built over the incidents, events, people and culture of his immediate vicinity. Tejasvi with his unique style and subject provides a great escape from the clichéd Kannada literature scene. He won ‘Kendra Saahitya Academy’ award for his ‘Chidambara Rahasya’. If you have not heard much about him, thats mostly because he has not lobbied for publicity or awards. If you want to start reading, I would recommend ‘Karvalo’ or ‘Parisarada Kathe’ (short stories). More about these books on some other occasion.

Kemmannugundi Travelogue

2006-04-27T10:41:00.000Z

Prologue

Since it had been a while since I took a break from work and went somewhere, my wife and I were looking for ways to break out of the hectic life schedule of Bangalore. Shrivalli had a lesson about Kemmannugundi sometime in her school and was absolutely convinced that, this is a place we must visit. It also fitted nicely into our constraints of time. I had been there once long ago so I knew it was a good place. So there it was, a trip to Kemmannugundi. We froze the long weekend of April 14th and kept talking about it almost 2 months before the D day and getting excited about it. I got a room booked for ourselves at the PWD Guesthouse there.
The wackiest idea in this however was doing the whole trip on our dear Pulsar 150-DTSI

We very well knew how much opposition we will have to face if we tell our parents about commuting ~700 Kms over a two wheeler so we made up a set of white-lies. So this informed everyone that we are out to Kemmannugundi but at the sametime except few trust-worthy friends nobody had an inkling about using the Bike.
Then we are all planned and excited about going and on 12th April Dr. Rajakumar passes away. Bangalore burns and we hear about things going wrong in other places in Karnataka. Suddenly all our plan is jeopardized and there are clouds of uncertainty hanging over our trip. But the very fact that I am writing this post means that we did decide to go ahead.

Day 1
We try to sleep early the previous night but somehow packing things et al takes till 11. we keep the luggage at the minimum possible of one jeans and two t-shirts apart from what we are wearing. We get up at 3-30 and start off from home at 4-25 AM from Whitefield. The idea is the beat the Bangalore traffic and avoid riots if any. Thanks to a cup of Black coffee and clod breeze, I am at my best alert levels and we drive off through Bangalore roads at 60kmph average (something that’s worth the early wake up). I make my mind up not to stop before 100 KM from home. The drive on the highway is extremely pleasant. The traffic was sparse and the trucks and buses were fairly disciplined in their driving. I keep driving at speeds of about 80-85 KMPH steadily. We stop just before dawn to take a break. The experience of parking on a highway lit by full moon before the dawn is just out of the world!

[Yeah what you see in the background is the moon]

We continue our journey, stop for breakfast at Channarayapatna. Its getting hotter now but driving is still fine.

We pass through Hassan by 9 AM and are at Chikkamaglur at 10!!. Not bad at all. 250 KMs in about 6 hours with lots of breaks and photos on the way. I fill some more petrol and head off towards Kemmannugundi. Just off Chikkamaglur the road suddenly becomes worse (not too bad, but worse compared to the national highway all along) but passes through coffee estates and view more than makes up for the road.

We are bit taken aback by the fact that its about 55 KM on this road that we have to travel to reach Kemmannugundi. Little did we know that its only going to get worse. You pass through several coffee estates and small villages. After about 25 Kms you come across a fork where one road goes to Bababudan giri and the other towards Kemmannugundi. We take the obvious route, keeping Bababudan giri visit for our return trip. The road here on becomes worse than any other road my bike had to take. There are small patches of well-laid roads, but the road has more curves than a full bowl of noodles and majority of the road is totally in a bad state. My bikes shock absorbers could only take so much so both of us had to give tough time for our backs. But we were not really complaining since the nature’s beauty all around was really breathtaking. Blue skies, green forests and estates with silver oak trees everywhere, torrents of water in the every other road bend you take… who would complain?

I was fairly tired with all the driving and being rattled mercilessly on my bike by the road. I was so tired that when Shrivalli asked me to pose for a photo, I decided to do so with my helmet on!!

We finally reached Kemmannugundi about noon. (yes, we took 2 hours for 55 Kms) only to find out that our bookings with the PWD guesthouse stand cancelled because some big-shot government officer was visiting. I would skip here our frustration at government bureaucracy; may be some other post on that. But let me say that it was extremely inconvenient and frustrating experience. There is only one other horticulture guesthouse there (which also turns out to be full) and we feel like abandoned in forest (which is almost true). Suddenly I lose nerves and all the pleasure of living amidst nature seems to vanish instantaneously. We finally manage to get another government guest house about 12 KM from Kemmannugundi at Kalhattgiri. We reach there at 4 after a brief walk around at Kemmannugundi followed by a lunch (worst one at that).

We rest for a while, spend evening there walking a bit following a waterfall and sitting at the guest house’s view point. We are tired, more due to the apathy of the guest house manager at Kemmannugundi than the journey itself. There are couple of small hotels (if you could use the word) available there where we managed to get our dinner and breakfast the next day. Shrivalli is fairly tired by now (bike journey is more straining for the pillion rider if you did not know) but never lets herself down a single moment. I keep wondering about the stuff she is built from. She claims mental strength can overcome physical strain and lives every work of what she says.

Day2:
After a breakfast and tea, we set off towards Kemmannugundi again, with some biscuits chips and soft drinks packed as contingency. we retrace the route that we took the previous day towards Kemmannugundi but this time, thanks to good sleep and better mental state, things start looking beautiful again. After about 1.5 km from Kemmannugundi is the diversion for Hebbe falls. The road seems very good for first 500 mts but little do I know that my bike and I will have to go through the toughest drive we ever had to take. We see a bunch of cars and small buses parked and people were being ferried into 4 wheel drive Jeeps. This should have given us some clue about the road ahead. I follow a Jeep on a road full of gravel and dust. I get annoyed by the dust behind the jeep and try to overtake it. I do it at one of the hairpin curves where the jeep slowed down and in the process almost skidded the bike off to the valley beneath!! I regain control over the bike and my heartbeats miraculously. Shrivalli, being the courageous woman she always is, does not say anything more than ‘careful’ -where someone else could have shouted her guts out- and sits like a rock behind me, helping me to balance the bike well. We pass through innumerable hairpin curves and raw roads at extremely steep angles. I keep hoping that I would not slip or skid anywhere but show off to be more confident than I actually am. Roads gets very steep at places and the slope combined with the gravel and mud hardly gives you any control on where you are going. With full breaks slammed I was still moving ahead at places. After about 7-8 kms on this road we finally reach the base station from with the falls is about 300mts away. It was a great relief to see few more bikes parked there because I was wondering if I was the only one who was insane enough to get my bike over here.

The sight, sound, calm and sweetness of the waterfall make us instantly forget all our pains. We grin at each other like small children involuntarily. This is surely one of the immaculate and beautiful falls that I ever saw.

We did not dare to get into the water since it was already a bit crowded there and it was not a great idea to leave your belongings on the shore and jump in. we instead settled for finding a nice rock with shade and a great view and sit there enjoying. It’s a different story altogether that I slipped off on a piece of moss while I went to fill in some water for drinking and fell “zoop” straight into knee deep water. Shrivalli had a laugh of her life watching me behave so stupidly. No harm done though.

We reluctantly pull out ourselves from the place and start ascending back. The road is more amenable this time since gravity assists you in controlling the bike better. We climb back fast but Shrivalli spots a tree full of wild berries. [Being bought up in western ghats, she has the expertise in identifying edible berries. We call them BiLi muLLe haNNu (Fruit of white thorns) locally ]. She and I become nostalgic about our respective childhood in which we munched on variety of these jungle fruits and feel bitter towards the civilization that took us away from all these pleasures. The fruits are really sweet and aromatic and we eat them voraciously. Shrivalli feels pity for all those hundreds of tourists who pass the tree each day and miss such a beautiful treat.

We drive now towards Bababudan giri and after a fairly uneventful drive we reach the fork
again. Its about 4-30 PM already and we are not very sure we will get a lot of time atop the hill since we want to stop driving before sunset. The roads are simply too risky to drive at night unless you are familiar with every corner.
As I drive uphill it’s the most beautiful drive I ever had. every bend on the road leaves you thinking you are about to take off from the edge into the deep infinity in the front. The view resembles what I would have seen flying on an airplane. Temperature drops steadily as you go up and wind blows harder. We get on the peak soon and we take a small 3 km drive to a place called Gali kere (Windy lake). Its surprising to see a lake (although pretty small) at that altitude. We take a small break there with few photos and descent soon to Chikkamaglur.

We reach Chikkamaglur at about 6-30 and check into a small cozy and fairly clean hotel. We are hungry so fill ourselves up with masala, rava AND open dosa along with customary Gudbud Icecream which we had missed for years. I felt strongly for a cup of Coffee being in the coffee kingdom but decided to save it for next day.

Day 3:
Next day we wake up fresh, Shrivalli accumulating all her might for another 250 KM on the bike. After a nice bath and breakfast (and yeah, an excellent cup of coffee) we leave at about 9-30 AM. We stop at Belur about 25 Kms from there and give a brief visit to the Archeologically gifted temple there.

The road seem heavenly after all the mud roads we took.

I try to go at a steady fast pace but traffic and heat slow us down. after several short breaks, we succumb to hunger and eat at a lousy dhaba near Nelamangala and after couple of light showers after this, reach home at about 5 PM.

It was indeed a great trip very rewarding and a bit tiring. It was a great adventure and lots and lots of fun. I must commend the durability of my bike, we never had any problem with my bike and it handled itself extremely well both on and off highways. And being married recently, this trip also served us to appreciate each other’s strengths that we were unaware of earlier.

Some useful info if you plan to take this trip yourself
Route: Bangalore -> Nelamangala (Take left to take Mangalore road) ->Channarayapatna-> Hassan -> Belur-> Chikkamaglur-> Kemmannugundi -> Hebbe Falls -> Kemmannugundi -> Bababudan Giri -> Chikkamaglur-> Belur-> Hassan… yeah, you will figure out the return path from here ;)
Distance: ~700 kms roundtrip
$$ Factor :
Accommodation: Guest house at Kemmannugundi 150-300 Rs/Day for double room , 250-500 Rs/Day at Chikkamaglur for double room
Food: Normal meals about 25rs/ head other things on par with Bangalore prices
Petrol: Cheaper as you move towards Mangaore!! Its 50.16/liter near Hassan compared to approx 50.66 in Bangalore!
Things to take: Jeans, t-shirt, comfortable footwear, camera.
Contact Numbers for Reservations: Horticulture Guesthouse =91-80-2657-3667
PWD Guesthouse: +91-8261-237-156

Life, one moment at a time

2006-01-19T07:19:00.000Z

I met with an accident. I was on my bike and skidded due to sudden breaking and fell on the road. A car behind me screeched to stop so avoid running over me. As I fell under the bumper of the car, there were split second thoughts running in my mind. The first one is bit too personal to share here but the next thing I could think of was, ‘had this been a truck instead of a car, I would have been dead by now’.
At that one moment when time freezes and whole of your life flashes in front of your eyes like a movie, one thing sunk into me that I have been hearing so many times. Life is so uncertain. I had seen one guy run over by a truck in a similar incident few days ago on my way to office. For a moment he was there and for the next, he was not there. Life is as uncertain as that. One second you exist, the next second you might not.

That is when it occurred to me that if there is anything you wanted to do in your life, NOW is the best time. Did you call up the friend you have wanted to call from a month? Did you say ‘I Love You’ to the people you love the most? Did you make the trip to the beach that you always planned?

My friend and colleague Sanjay told me once an interesting fact about medieval Japanese Samurais. Being the people who were ready to sacrifice their lives for their master, death was always a possibility for them. Samurais were prepared to die any moment so each of the moment lived, they lived it to the fullest. They enjoyed the beauty of things around them and did things that are beautiful. If I got Sanjay right, he meant all the beautiful arts of Japan are spin-offs for this appreciation beauty. I see a point in seeing beauty in everything around you, every moment of life, taking life and death as equally probable path. Yes, we all love life but we don’t have much choice to decide the course of its end. Makes more sense if we live life to the fullest when it exists.

But let this not make you a pessimist. Life has to be taken in a optimistic way for the very reason that its uncertain. Life goes on with all the uncertainties.

Reminds me of one incident in Mahabharata where an Yaksha asks Yudhishthira what he thinks is the strangest thing in this world. Yudhishthira says ‘I find it very strange that people of this world go on living their lives as if life is eternal although death is always lurking at every corner of their lives’. Yes, that’s the strangest thing about this world and its good that day-to-day life goes on without ever acknowledging the possibility of death. That’s the way it should be but deep inside, it would make our lives meaningful if we know how to make best use of our lives while it lasts.
Live your day!

Rang De Basanti - Music Review

2005-12-16T13:19:00.000Z

One thing is for sure. After you listen to this album, you feel like you have just taken a walk around a virtual ‘World Musci Expo’ !! There is so much variety of genre in this album that its hard to believe its all one person’s creativity. Well, that’s the genius of A R Rahman. Lets take a walk around the songs.

1. Ik Onkar: The first song in the album sets out with a devotional note. Extremely short song at a total length of 1:26 minutes. Significantly devoid of any instrumentation (except a tanpura (?) in the background) the song is an invocation for the rest of the musical spirit that is in the remainder of the album. Hardeep Kaur does a good job of rendering this. Punjabi Lyrics instead of more common Sanskrit verses on a devotional song make the flavor of this song very unique for a Bollywood song. The song ends when you are asking for more and you end up wishing Hardeep Kaur had more opportunity to showcase her talent. Rating 6/10.

2. Rang de Basanti: Flavor of Punjab again but amazing shift from the earlier song. It does start with a typical Bhnagra chorus of “aha aha.. ding ding ding ding” and the Dholak beating up fast paced rhythm. And then there is Daler Mehandi who has rendered this song. But before you conclude that this is one more Indi-Pop stuff like ‘Tunak-Tunak’ or something like that, it takes you by surprise in the way it morphs into a more free flowing structure. It has all the essential flavor of a Bhangra song but has much more. It breaks the tradition of mukhda-antra-mukhda and the song structure goes more like western structure of antra-mukhda-antra. But even then the distinction is not very clear and the whole song seems like a free flow of rhythm and rhythmatic lyrics. Reminds a bit of Breathless by Shankar Mahadevan. Amazing how much energy Daler’s voices has infused in this song. And there is a treat of Indian percussion and strings. Then there is one more unique way of using chords to bring in rhythm too. (I once saw similar technique used by a train-singer on Bangalore-Hyderabad train. He was using chords as substitute for percussions). Chitra makes a cameo appearance near the end of the song. Nothing outstanding to mention on her part. Odds that this song will be one of the chart busters or the dance numbers. There is rhythm everywhere in this song. Rating 8/10.

3. Paathshala: Paathshala means school. And no prizes for guessing that it’s a ‘youth’ song with lot of energy. You would have heard several of such songs in all the Tamil College flick movies. So you are thrown suddenly from Punjab into a discotheque. Starts as a techno track and then takes many twists through various genre. Makes good listening for unwinding. And there is one part I love where there is some kind of low frequency wind pipe being blown in the background. Totally out of this world! Wonder where ARR and his team get such instruments/samples. Singers (Naresh Iyer and Mohamed Aslam) do a good job if not exceptional. Lyrics.. well, lets not bother to discuss them. Apparently everyone thinks writing college song lyrics means making a collage of all the latest buzzwords. Rating 6/10.

4. Tu Bin Bataye: Madhushree apparently has the sweetest voice around. This slow paced melody sounds like at lullaby. Tune is simple. But there is amazing violin/viola orchestra in the background during most of the song giving it a western touch. After long, Rahman puts in a fairly long interlude, which has an different flavour from the song itself and still jells with the song well. This has been so rare in his recent work. I still crave for interludes of the quality of Kannamoochi (Kandukondein Kandukondein) and Soukiyama (Sangamam). Naresh Iyers drops in to sing the last stanza and brings in his misty surrealistic voice to good use. A good quality song overall. Rating 7/10.

5. Khalbali: And just when you step out of Bollywood lori (lullaby), you suddenly enter Middle East!! The very middle-east song complete with Arabic Lyrics, Arabic Singer (Nacim), Middle East percussion fused with modern percussion and strings. ARR gives another modulated (naturally modulated I mean; not using any digital synthesis) voice performance where he brings in the Middle East effect by waxing and waning the voice over every syllable. Aslam’s voice brings in the soft-sweet component of the song. Excellent performance by all the singers. Look out for a small percussion interlude. Rating 8/10.

6. Khoon Chala: The song that requires and deserves all your attention. Mohit Chauhan (Lead Singer of the band Silk Route) does an excellent work on this soft song with very powerful lyrics with soft words. The song has a slow pace accompanied by soft piano notes in the background. Near the end the song moves to a crescendo with the voices and music getting louder and moving up the scale. The song which would have been an all time great song in someone else’s album, becomes a ‘fine’ song in this album. Not that’s its not great, its greatness is over shadowed by the brilliance if other songs. Rating 8/10.

7. Paathshala-Be A Rebel: First things first, every time I listen to this song, I look at my mobile invariably. ARR has used the standard ‘beep-once’ tone of Nokia phones in this song (or something that’s very similar). This song is a remix of Paathshala (of course with the beep once). Along with the singers in the original version, Blaaze comes in with lot of rap. There is one particular when he says ‘Zinda-bad, zinda-good’ which for some unknown reason I find extremely funny. Good experiment with some rapping in a movie album. I like this song too. Rating 7/10.

8. Luka Chuppi: Just when you have started to think Lata Mangeshkars days are over, here she is, back with eternally melodious voice. I would rate this the best song in this album. It starts with a beautiful strumming of guitar in a lively pace (which incidentally reminded me of Lucky Ali’s O Sanam after long). But then the song turns itself into a vocal melody where Lata’s immaculate voice makes you float in clouds. Then the master gets in with his lively and emotion filled rendition of amazingly well written lyrics. The song is structured as a dialogue between the mother and the son. Don’t be surprised if this gets best song/singer award at many places. I however noticed that there is a slight difference in ARR’s voice from what we have been used to hearing. Don’t know if it is there for a particular reason though. Anyway, it’s still an all time great song. ARR’s style in this song reminds me vaguely of SD Burman. I was very disappointed by ARR using the same tune as Mukhda for the interlude. Let me say I would not expect such thing from the maestro. Well, the semi-classical aalap near the end makes for it I suppose. Rating 9.5/10

9. Lalkaar: We all knew Aamir Khan’s strength is in acting, but I am surprised to see the power in his mere voice. This is a half-recital with some chorus of the famous ‘sarfaroshi ki tamann’. ( I am not sure if the lyrics are the original poem itself or adopted). There is not too much to say musically about it except the bass-rich vocals and some percussions. Its an interesting experiment and I am sure it serves an excellent purpose in narration of the film. I suppose the song is more relevant in the movie. Rating 6/10.

10. Roobaroo: One more strumming guitar prelude with some ‘ooo-ooo-ooo-ooo’ chorus vocals ( I hate my memory sometimes, even if I don’t wish, this ooo-ooo thing reminds me of the OST track in Kill-Bill in the Japanese Club scene when Beatrice goes to kill Ishii O-Ren). Naresh Iyer gets the relaxed “chill” factor in this song and ARR’s powerful ‘Roobaroo’ gives the song all the enthusiasm. This is definitely a new age song. Excellent use of several human voices in chorus, rhythm and background music. Rating 7.5/10.

Ooh, the review went much longer than I had though. But an excellent album like this very well deserves my time and hopefully yours too. Go buy the Cassette/CD from your nearest Music Store. Stop piracy please. I will write some other time why I stopped listening to pirated music but for now, heed to my advice.

PS: I heard from a someone some glimpses of the story line of the film. Though I will share it too (not sure of the authenticity though). The lead actors are one carefree group of Delhi youth. They are typical stereotype of modern Indian youth with materialistic orientation and ignorance and indifference towards India’s present and past struggles. They are approached by a British film maker who wants to make a docu-drama about India’s freedom struggle. Now these guys are in a situation where they are supposed to get into the skins of heroes of independence struggle. The movie then goes into the transformation that these characters go through.
Looks a very interesting story. Looking forward to it :)

CFD An Introduction

2005-12-14T05:47:00.000Z

In simple words, CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) means solving the governing
equations of a flow numerically. The Governing
equations (e.g. Navier Stokes equn or Euler equn) will
invariably be a differential equation. That is, we
know how the 'derivatives' of the flow properties
(velocity, pressure, density, temperature, entropy,
enthalpy etc) behave but we dont know how the
properties themselves behave(vary)in the flow space.
We actually know the equations in the form of derivatives by few fundamental principles like conservation of mass, momentun energy etc. Pretty obvious stuff I should say.

So as might be guessed, if you integrate these diff
equns, you will get the functions that describe flow
properties over the entire flow space. Unfortunately,
most of these governing equations are not linear and
not homogeneous(go back to engineering maths). Hence
there is no mathematical way to solve (integrate)
these equations. Hence we are forced to integrate
these equations numericaly.
If you again go back to engineering maths and
remember something called 'numerical metods for
integration' or 'Runge-Kutta method' or 'Taylor's
expansions' you know that you can solve almost any
differential equn using these. So in CFD, we devide
the flow space into a number of small volumes(what is
called grid generation), we convert the differential
equation in to its numerical anologue and try to solve
it over every small volume in the flow field. (Very
similar to Finite Element methods in structural
engineering). To do this, we also need something
called a boundary condition which specifies the known
behaviour of the functions at given
line/surface/volume in space. (These boundary
conditions are akin to the boundary conditions we use
in physics/maths to get rid of that integration
constant). If the solution is time dependent(i.e., you
want to model the flow over a time), we also need what
is called an initial condition which specifies the
whole flow at time=0.
All these process needs tremendous amount of
computaional power and memory since you can easily
have a couple of million points and as many equations
to solve if you model a decently large flow space (say
an aircraft wing).
then after all these effort, you get the values of
flow variables over the whole space and you can use
some graphical method to analyse the data.
In commercial softwares, however, most of the times
you will not know what is happening in the background
but it is something very similar to what I have
explained above. Only that you dont generate the whole
grid (there are grid generatros), you dont solve the
equations (there are solvers) and you dont bother much
to represent the data graphically (there are viewers).
I hope this was simple enough to understand. If you
want to know little more in detail, there are several books and other resources on the net and at your nearest technical library. Here is a list of resources.

If you really want to DO CFD on your own, then you
can choose many books available in bookstores. If you
only want to learn to use the softwares, the user
manuals and the classes are the best places to go.

This is the traditional way of CFD. There are newer methogs that take several different approaches. ANd ofcourse you can make the problem more complicated by involving chemical reactions etc. But thats for an expert CFD guy.

COPYRIGHT: This article (!!??) was written by
Narasimha Shastri and you are free to
read/copy/distribut/modify/delete it at your own will
as long as you write a comment here if you like it.

Shantaram - Book Review

2005-12-07T13:36:00.000Z

I must admit I may be biased a bit when I write the review of this book. For, during all these years of my reading, I have not come across a book that has been so unique.
It all started when I read that Johnny Depp has bought rights for some book called Shantaram. I first though what would Depp would have to do with V Shantaram the Indian film maker. Then when I read more, I found out that it is about an unbelievably amazing story about an Australian Criminal finding a new way of life in Mumbai. It roused my curiosity and as usual, I forgot all about it just like several other things. And one fine day I found the book again on Amazon and then the first few sample pages made me order that book. Of course, I am not rich enough to pay in Dollars so I ordered the book through Sapnaonline (Sapna is one of the most trusted bookstores in Bangalore that has been operating for several decades now. They also have online store that has given me excellent shopping experience in terms of delivery, prices and payment options).

I was expecting a James-Hadley-Chase type of suspense thriller of a book that I could read in a few hours. But my heart sank when the guy delivered a 900+ page brick of a book. But little did I know then that it would be one of the most enjoyable and fast paced 900 pages I have ever read. So let me reassure you here not to be intimidated by the size of the book.
Let me sketch the outline of the book a bit here. Gregory David Roberts (GDR), the author, once was convicted in Australia for armed robberies that he had been undertaking in order to feed his Heroin addiction. He breaks out of the highest security prison in Australia and escapes to India on a fake New Zealand Passport. He lands in Bombay, becomes associated with local people and makes lot of friends. Fate takes him through several turns in life in which he becomes (mostly by choice) a slum dweller, a ‘doctor’, a Cholera warrior, a Passport faker, a black market currency exchanger, a smuggler, an gun runner.. just to name a few roles. He sees the real India starting from Mumbai till a remote village in Maharshtra. He is put in an Indian jail, survives hired assassins, survives road accidents and survives one more heroin addiction. Of course, all 900+ pages are full with lot of such incidents.

What makes this book special however is that it is (mostly) biographical. I would assume fiction has been used to a good extant but still most of the story really took place with the person. But going through a tough life is one thing, and putting it down as a book to which readers can relate to is other. This is exactly the place where GDR’s writing career before his Heroin days in Australia comes to help. Hence there is this book that is at its best in telling a true story, in a way that stirs you. Several times in the book you identify yourself with one or the other characters making it an extremely interesting book. Of course the portraying of characters is so well done that Didier, Khader, Prabhakar, Karla, do not seem like strangers anymore after a few pages. You would start relating to those people independent of the other characters and I am sure you will map them to people you have known.

The book is also unique because its one of the rare books in which a foreigner has taken a deep plunge into the deepest of Indian society’s complexities and also done a successful job of understanding the underlying unifying theme. Of course he admires Indians for what it is but never hesitates a moment before showing things that are obviously wrong.

The other aspect of this book is the details you get about the systems that operate most of the world. The police, currency, gold, drugs, prostitution etc. At no point in the book they overwhelm the main story though. Let me say this book also serves as a Crime-101 J
And the best of all are the one-liners from several characters in the book (especially from Karla and Didier) that leave you pondering over them for hours or years depending on your own shallowness or depth. I think most of the credit for making the book ‘great’ goes to these random notes that appear to be so original and fit as much in the story as they do in your own life.

Yes, there are flipsides to this book. At least in my opinion it becomes too ‘poetic’ at places. Several times in the book you will find sentences like ‘the ocean of her eyes had the freshness of first rain over the dryness of my heart’. (I made this line up but you get the idea ;) )
There are several such metaphors and other figures of speech that could have been done away with. Well, you may like them though. Then I think the book could have been trimmed a bit by a couple of hundred pages. Not that the book gets boring at any point of time, but a tighter editing would not have hurt.

So read this book if you are looking for an excellent literary work that takes you through so many aspects of life that you could possibly not have been able to go through on your own.
This is among one book that makes you feel that all your effort invested in reading habit worthwhile in spite of so many mediocre work you come across.
Happy reading and watch out for the movie release in 2007.

Here is the official link.

PS: This book is vaguely in the league of Papillon by Henri Charriere . So if you liked that book, chances are that you will like this one too. I have read that book and well, liked it a lot. May be I will write a review some other time.

Moth or Butterfly?

2005-12-07T10:30:00.000Z

Hibernation is over and don’t know if a beautiful butterfly or an ugly moth has emerged though!!Yes I decided to start again. The pressure to write was too much.. from within me of course! I have decided to keep writing for now and worry later about WHAT exactly I should write. Yes, I have changed my decision. People change and that’s the biggest positive and negative thing about the human race. Well, people do change and they change drastically too. See my book review on Shantaram and you would know how a person can change and sustain so many different roles. (Hope to post the review by today.)

Hibernation-Pupation

2005-09-21T12:03:00.000Z

Yes, I know, the Friday passed, then did the other one. I did not write the thing I was supposed to. I just hope I was not missed.
But I should tell you that it was not the busy work schedule, not the writers block nor any of those typical things that make a blog sink.

I was actually trying to think over and get an insight into my blogging activities. I must admit, I started blogging impulsively. I did not give a rational thought onto what I will write about and who my audience will be. I was writing because I like to write. But that did not do more good than fulfilling my writing needs.

It was this e-book of . Seth Godin that brought me to think about what is the worth of blogging.
Please sit back and relax while I give a serious thinking into what I should be writing about. I may take sometime because once I commit to this, it will be a long time commitment. May be its just a pupation time for me and for all I know, there may be a beautiful butterfly at the end of this.

And in case you were wondering, I will be at A R Rahman concert on 8th October.

What I learnt by going to school

2005-09-06T14:49:00.000Z

Yesterday was teacher’s day. I wrote to my favorite teacher telling how my teachers have impacted my life in a positive way. But this post is not about what teachers taught me at school. I am going to write what learning I got by going to school/college that made me live my life better.

I was not the one: I still remember the first day when I went to school. It was a pleasant eye-opener for a person like me who has remained the center of my own universe of my family and surroundings. Going to the school made me to realize I was NOT the center of the universe and I am only a part of the big. Don’t get me wrong; going to school did not kill my ego. It only gave me a more objective view of the world and taught me to survive in a world where everyone once thought he/she was the center of universe.

United we stand: I realized by going to the school that if you wish to achieve something, the best way to go about is to have a great team. A team could have been only as small as 2 people and may be as big as 20. Be it sharing notes of a class-subject or the inter-collegiate quiz competition, more brains the merrier. School taught me teamwork pays and that the nerds go nowhere!

Hard work pays: I think I did not learn this lesson very well myself ;).. On a serious note, the school system makes it very clear in the young minds that there is a reward for your effort. You study hard, you get a pat on the back, you lazy around and your parents are called to school!! I guess all this has an unconscious effect on the students and the lessons learnt remain for life.

Friends count: chances are that your best friend was once your school/classmate. All of us make a lot of friends at school and you learn to appreciate a friend as you go. I have written why friends are so great earlier. School teaches you that life is so much more fun with friends around.

The fittest survives: at least for me, the schools taught me how to be competitive. Be it in studies or sports, healthy competition can take you a long way and help you realize your true potential. At school I learnt the importance of competition and how that can help us succeed.

Before we end: I recently saw a ‘mobile school’ in Bangalore. It is actually a bus with the seats removed so that the bus is now a big classroom with black board and stuff. Basic objective of the theme is to help the underprivileged children who cant travel to school due to social constraints. So the bus just picks up kids and goes to a place to park where lessons are taught and then drops the kids back home. How ingenious!!

Friday: Where can you find me on October 8th

Was Moon Landing a Hoax?

2005-09-02T12:10:00.000Z

I have written earlier making very clear that I hate anti-science and I hate misinformation. Twisting, manipulating or selective ignorance can lead you to believe insane things. I want to emphasize this using the example of moon hoax case.

Several years after NASA sent man to the moon, there were serious doubts voiced expressing a doubt about whether NASA really sent men to moon or just shot a ‘movie’ somewhere in Nevada. The people who claimed that all NASA did was an eyewash had serious ‘facts’ to back up the issue and they were writing books and selling them based on these. I must say lot of money was made. It was when a documentary was telecasted on NBC that the whole thing blew out of proportion and there was a big majority of people who felt betrayed by what NASA supposedly did with all the tax-payer money.

All this while people in the scientific community just sat there watching fun, [its like when you see that your little kid is messing around with mud, you kind of ignore it for a while, letting the child have fun] but it got to a point where there would be lot more damage if they did not do anything. So that’s when they voiced their opinion. Unfortunately it was too little too late.

Till today there are a lot of people who believe that men did not really go to the moon. This blog entry is my contribution to the rational voice. I will make a few notes about the argument that the ‘hoax’ proponents put forward and then add my comments telling why that is bullshit.

Claim: The photos taken on moon show no stars, the shadows are not parallel, and the photos are too good to be true. So it was all shot in Nevada with spotlights
Truth: If you already did not know, I am an amateur photographer. Any photographer who sees the moon photos can tell you why you can see stars in that photo and why the shadows are not parallel to each other (ever heard of the perspective?). Its shameful that rather than hiding their ignorance about light and photography, the moon hoaxers are making weird claims.

Claim: The flag on the moon was fluttering. There is no air on moon so, unless the ‘movie’ was shot on earth, it could not flutter.
Truth: The flag was NOT fluttering. It was ‘oscillating’ because it was hoisted on a flexible aluminum poll. If you ever get to see the video again, observe that the astronaut had to twist the poll to make it enter the lunar surface and stand. Those shakings still remain for long unlike earth where the air dampens the motion out. (In fact, for this reason, the very observation can used to claim that this was not place on earth)

Claim: there was no dust when the moon module landed or took off.
Truth: Exactly! The moon’s gravity is only 1/6th that of earth so you need less powerful rockets. The rockets used to land and launch the lunar module produce mostly colorless and smokeless unlike the solid strap-on boosters we use to launch rockets from earth. And then, most importantly, since there is no atmosphere on moon, the dust that might be raised, can not get suspended in air so cant make a huge cloud.

I think I can go on and on doing this, but I will leave it to the experts. See this site that I admire most and covers the moon hoax to the greatest detail.

I really appreciate the effort and breakthroughs that might have gone into making the moon mission a success. I would assume the whole Apollo moon mission would have had access to computing powers that were less capable that your mobile phones today. With all that people risked their lives and took to a journey of millions of kilometer where a miscalculation of few meters would have cost them their lives.

What I want to say here is that it is always important to have full knowledge and details at hand before making any conclusions. That’s the way science works. That’s the way most successful decisions ever made work. Anti science does not work that way. It works on misinformation, bad correlations, assumptions, perceptions and everything other than simple logic. Unfortunately that’s more appealing to the psychology of majority of the human beings. It is for people like you and me who have to spread the awareness.

It’s a duty you and I have. I am working on my part how about you?

Notes: There were also lot of other conspiracy theories that claim US government is concealing information on UFOs, that the aliens visit earth everyday, that comets herald disasters etc. I don’t believe any of them. For lots of observations these guys make, there are much simpler and more plausible explanation than a commuting alien.

Before we end: Talking about aliens, I want to quote Calvin again here
Calvin: “The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that it has never tried to contact us”
I cant agree more!!

Aditya wanted this.

Tuesday: What I learnt by going to school

Calvin and Hobbes!

2005-08-30T11:27:00.000Z

I am 26 years old and still read comics! And I am proud of that fact!! Of course since childhood I have been an avid reader of both funny and adventurous comic strips like Henry , The Phantom, Calvin and Hobbes when Calvin was having one of his freak missions on a planet near the end of the Galaxy. I thought, "what crap, whats so funny about being a weirdo? " I was to be proven wrong. It only took me few more days worth of strips on the news paper [The Times of India, Bangalore Edition] to know Calvin and Hobbes well. We have been friends ever after!
Calvin is the Kid I once was, Calvin is the kid once you were. Everything you can describe about him must be used with a prefix – ‘hyper’. He is hyperactive, hyperimaginative, hyperintelligent and what not. Hobbes is his best friend and philosopher. They complement each other very well. Then there are a lot of supporting characters like Calvin’s parents, Susie (the girl next door), Miss Wormwood (the class teacher), Moe (the school bully) etc.

But the best part about the strip is that while being one of the most whacky and funny strips around, it also a strip that helps you to look deep inside yourself. Very often in the strip, there is a clear sarcasm against consumerism, television and wars and violence. There are several socio-economical issues addressed in the strip, like environment pollution and freedom of expression, through the eyes of a ‘too old for his age’ 5 year old kid. Above all these, the strip speaks a lot about the philosophy of the life itself. Calvin and Hobbes together teach you how best to look at life in a positive way. Just think about what Calvin once says “Life can never become so bad that it cant get any worse”. Isn’t it a wonderful way to look forward for future, does not matter how bad your situation is, you should feel happy that it could have been worse. When you can be positive when you are down, you can only go up from there.
I am not mentioning anything about the smile part of the strip at all. Each strip is guaranteed to give a smile to your face either in pure fun or by sarcasm or by the enlightenment over one of the statements in the strip. After all, cartoon strips are supposed to make us laugh right?

Notes:
It’s a pity that the strip ran only for about a decade and the author Bill Watterson decided against continuing the strip. While he officially states his inability to adhere to the demanding schedule of a syndicated cartoonist, there is a lot of grapevine over the internet telling Bill, being the anti-commercialization guy and an real artist he was, decided to pull the plug when the syndicates were trying to push commercialization onto his strips. He has been a rebellious comic strip author since the beginning, questioning and challenging the limitations that the art was imposed by the syndicates and newspapers. Against all odds he succeeded in dictating his terms to the papers and hence you see many of the Sunday strips of C&H that do not fit into normal ‘comic strip’ format. He then experimented a lot on use of white space, telling story in various forms etc.

Before we end: Have you ever observed that all the characters in all comic strips have only 4 fingers on their hands? I vaguely remember that this was to accommodate some needs in printing them on newsprint.
Friday: Some more anti-science: Was Moon Landing a Hoax?

Why Photography is such a great hobby

2005-08-26T08:04:00.000Z

It was not until I was 23 that I bought my first camera. It was a point and shoot digicam bought with the intension of shooting tourist attractions in the beautiful country I was at that time. But believe it or not, within 2 days of shooting, I realized that Photography will be the hobby that’s made for me. I sold that camera (for a 10$ profit J ) and bought a versatile digicam. [See some photos from that camera here] . Then very soon I migrated to a film SLR.

I want to share with you why photography struck such a chord with me and why you should try it out too!
High rewards
The greatest reward for a photographer is the satisfaction of seeing a photo and feeling ‘oh I did a good job capturing the beauty for ever’. That’s what photography is all about, beauty. Haven’t you ever seen a photo where a sunrise, which would only last for such a short time otherwise, being eternally captured on film? Haven’t you even seen the beautiful smile of a child being recorded forever, which would otherwise get lost in the dark aisles of time? Don’t you find it amazing? I do. That’s why I shoot!
See this beautiful sunrise from Bangalore. I captured it a preserved it for those who could not be there!

It’s a scientific art
Now, Photography is one art that involves so much understanding of science that it tickles the scientist inside me! No no, don’t be intimidated, it is no rocket science. [On the other hand, CFD, a major component of Rocket Science is what I do for a living] Its just the scientific intuition that you need to develop to imagine how your final photo will look like, when you allow the camera to do something. Believe me, it is easy. As you long as you are willing to experiment, you will have an easy time.

Its not about the camera, its about the eye!
Contrary to what you may think, its not the camera that makes a great photo; it is the photographer. It’s the ‘eye’ that makes the photo. There are several photos that were made at the crappiest of the places.

It just takes your eyes to identify and shoot. If you have the ‘eye’, you can shoot anywhere. See this photo I shot in my Office. Yes, it is in my office.

So its not that you need a great camera. There is this Taxi driver who just shoots with his point and shoot camera and published a great book with the photos So you can do what you want with what you have. People buy expensive cameras only because they are a bit lazy to go the extra mile on a point and shoot to get a good photo. I must admit, I am on such person :-

I love photography and I will keep writing some articles in future to address certain basic techniques. Let me know if you are looking for anything in particular.

Before we end: I do not really advocate the cell-phone cameras if you want to do serious photography. They are OK for shooting a snap of your cousin’s kid or neighbor’s dog but if you want to learn how to make a great photo, start with a Digital or Film camera.

Tuesday: Calvin and Hobbes!

Friends are Guy’s best Diamonds

2005-08-23T08:01:00.000Z

Marilyn Munroe once sang Diamonds are a girl’s best friends. Well, I would take it from her. I am not a girl so I don’t know. But I surely know what a guy’s best diamonds are. It’s the friends! (I am pretty sure girls agree with this too, I guess Marilyn would have).

I would hate to think what would my life be like, if I had no friends. So what makes friends so wonderful? Here are my thoughts.

A friend is just there for you.
And you know it. You might have a thousand people to open your self up when you are feeling great, but when you are down, and when you need someone to just say ‘I am there’, a friend is always there. A friend is there when you have had a crush and also when you have had heartbreak. A friend is there when you topped your class and also when you flunked. A friend is there when your parents felt proud about you and also when your parents were ashamed they gave birth to you.
A friend would be there for you, always.

You make your friends
A friend is not someone who comes to you by default. You make a (conscious or unconscious) decision to choose someone as a friend. Its so much more different compared to relatives where you have no choice. Relatives, on the other hand, come by default with your birth. You don’t have a choice there. So when you choose a friend its mostly someone with whom you feel comfortable being with. It is not necessary that you are similar people. What matters is how well you get along with each other and complement each other. That makes friends so much more likable!

A friend wishes the best for you
A friend is always keen to make things work best for you. A friend believes and wishes that you pass in a competitive exam although you are not sure yourself that you will. A friend makes you aware of your needs for improvement and wont let you stop till you work on it. A friend would fight with you with enough fire to kill an army, only because he thinks what you are doing is not best for you. Believe me, having a great friend is next best thing to being the most selfish person on the earth; You know you are going to get the best deal!

Friends dream with you
Friends are there to share your dreams and dream about them as vividly as you will. Be it about your life, career, passions or anything else, a friend has room to accommodate your dream. A friend would help you to make your dream a reality. Dreams, get better when shared.

Having a great friend is a one-stop solution for your soul. Get your copy NOW!! ;)

Note: I have used ‘he’ for a friend often but please treat it as a common gender.

Before we end: there are studies that show why friendship is also a reason a species survive the battle of evolution. See this for example. Friendship as a human behavior has been of interest to many Evolutionary Psychologists. No wonder friendship is a basic human instinct and common to all cultures in the world. Explain why the sitcom Friends was such a global hit.

Friday: Why Photography is such a great hobby

Religion in science classroom?

2005-08-18T09:34:00.000Z

Recently, the Kansas school board decided to start teaching theory of Intelligent Design (ID) along with theory of Evolution in science classrooms. [Intelligent design refers to the religious belief that the universe was created by God] Apparently president Bush is also a supporter of this. Needless to say, there was a very strong opposition about the whole issue. People have come up with innovative way to protest. See this cool guy who wrote a very satiric open letter to the school board telling why FSM (Flying Spaghetti Monster) theory of creation should be given its due space in the science classroom along with ID. (Have a look at the link; the laugh is worth the time). His site has already been getting millions of hits. Then there is a group of people who have decided to Google bomb the phrase Intelligent Design. See where the links on “Intelligent Design” in this page are pointing to and you already know that I am supporting that group ;)

Today I am going to write why it is ridiculous to teach ID in classroom and in general why I think it is not a great idea to mix science and religion at least at the school level.

Teach ID in a religion classroom and I will probably the last person to object. What I am against is teaching ID in science classroom. Theory of evolution is based on observable and verifiable facts. The scientific approach is based on these very fundamentals and teaching evolution in science class is absolutely correct thing to do. In fact, by teaching theory of evolution in classrooms, we will only be enhancing the ability of young minds to make rational and logical decisions out of available evidence.
On the other hand, religious theories are based on faith and belief. In religion, more often than not, a theory is woven such that it explains (or attempts to explain) the observations. When your mind is working in faith mode, there is no room for logic and no room for questions to be asked. Quite easy to see why the whole thing does not fit the science classroom session.

Several people and organizations over the world, including orthodox Christians, have been opposing the decision of Kansas school board and its not difficult to see why. While it is true that there can be only one right theory of creation, ID or Evolution or something else, I am not arguing which is the correct theory and why. Lets take it at some other time. What I am upset about it that science and religion work on different platforms and are based on different schools of thought.

I have made conscious efforts not to mix these two things with each other. I see no point when someone publishes a ‘scientific’ paper backing up a religious theory or the other way round. I mean, what are you trying to prove? If you are a strongly religious man and think science is not mature enough to handle religion, why are you looking for an opportunity to ‘convince’ someone that religion is science? Wont it make more sense to just keep it to yourself and believe in God that the right thing will ultimately gain acceptance?

One fine day, sometime in the future, may be they will both be unified and will be one unified way of thinking. May be. But till then, lets keep them apart!

Notes:
A few of years ago Universities in India decided to allow Astrology (not Astronomy) as a research area. See this. No need to say, this was again an example of mixing science and faith and there was quite an amount of resistance for this. See this.

Before we end:
If you are looking for a great religion that makes your life fun when you are living AND after you are dead, try FSMism.

There are few reasons you should embrace FSMism at once. Some of them (from FSM site) are
a. Flimsy moral standards
b. Every Friday is a religious holiday
c. The heaven has Stripper factory and Beer volcano!!
What else are you looking for! Join now. You don’t want to attract the wrath of almighty FSM do you?

Coming up next: Friends are Guy’s best Diamonds

Misinformation in the information age

2005-08-17T09:38:00.000Z

What better way to start blogging than doing it with your favorite topic? So I am glad to start with bashing Anti-science!

A few weeks ago one of my friends sent me a mail (forwarded of course) that claimed that the Mars would look as big as the moon on August 27th. The mail came with an exceptionally beautiful image of Mars, artificially enhanced backdrop and all, which I am not bothering to post here. Here is the mail.

NO ONE ALIVE TODAY WILL EVER SEE THIS AGAIN.
The Red Planet (MARS) is about to be spectacular! This month and next, Earth is catching up with Mars in an encounter that will culminate in the closest approach between the two planets in recorded history.
The next time Mars may come this close is in 2287. Due to the way Jupiter's gravity tugs on Mars and perturbs its orbit, astronomers can only be certain that Mars has not come this close to Earth in the last 5,000 years, but it may be as long as 60,000 years before it happens again.
The encounter will culminate on August 27th when Mars comes to within 34,649,589 miles of Earth and will be (next to the moon) the brightest object in the night sky. It will attain a magnitude of - 2.9 and will appear 25.11 arc seconds wide. By August 27, Mars will look as large as the full moon to the naked eye. Mars will be easy to spot.
At the beginning of August it will rise in the east at 10p.m. and reach its azimuth at about 3 a.m. by the end of August when the two planets are closest, Mars will rise at nightfall and reach its highest point in the sky at 12:30a.m. That's pretty convenient to see something that no human being has seen in recorded history. So, mark your calendar at the beginning of August to see Mars grow progressively
brighter and brighter throughout the month.

No, being the astronomy enthusiast I was, I was not happy. I was totally taken aback by the claims made and I strongly felt it is my duty to respond to this mail.
Here are excerpts from my reply.

I just hope you saw the Mars – Venus – Saturn line up one of these days. For those who were expecting a big disc shaped mars image, my sympathies ;)
Lets now have an objective look at the claims made in this forward. I will take that the numbers are right (I have no skill nor patience to do the math to get those numbers again). But I will only contest the ‘interpretations’ of these numbers.

1. Mars will attain a magnitude of –2.9 by 27th august.
Great!! Magnitude is an unit of measurement of visible brightness of celestial bodies. It’s an inverse logarithmic scale. Meaning magnitude 1 star is brighter than a magnitude 2 star by 10 times. The faintest visible stars are in the magnitude of around 6 and the brightest night-sky star [Sirius] is about –1.4 in magnitude. So –2.9 is really bright. I am glad I must admit. But hold on. Still don’t expect it to look like the full moon. Under clear skies, the full moon gets a magnitude of –12.7 or so. Just do the mats and you will see that the brightest Mars will be at least 10e9 times less intense than full moon. Disappointing ha? Sorry it is so.

2. Mars will have a dimension of 25.11 arc seconds
The bad news first; I am not impressed. Lets see how big is this 25.11 thing.
As engineers we all know arc second is a measure of angle. Its about 1/3600th of a degree. [phew]
To give you an idea, the full moon is about half degree wide. Say 1800 arc seconds. Even giving mars a 30 second size will make it 60 times smaller than the full moon. And we are talking only of width. For our eyes what matters is the area. So if you do simple math again, mars will be 60x60 = 3600 times smaller than the full moon.

To summarize, mars will be 3600 times smaller and 1,000,000,000 times less bright than the full moon.

There are also other discrepancies in this forward, which make me think this is circulating from last year. This year August I don’t think mars will attain its peak at 12:30 in the night [in any time zone]. I may be wrong here though.

I chose the above case just to show what exactly I hate. I hate misinformation. If you don’t know or not sure, just shut up or ask someone who knows. I strongly believe that misinformation is more damaging than no information at all. You can blame misinformation for all the rumors, riots, religious fanatism, and other assorted set of mass brainwash.
While I understand that several of the sciences, arts and other human interests need to reach to the masses and require certain amount of publicity/push by the media, I am almost always pissed off totally with the way the media twists facts, include baseless claims and over all ‘sex-up’ things. I am strongly against creating scientific awareness by such means. You are doing more damage than you are serving the cause.

Misinformation can have such strong effects that it can even make rational people think irrationally. Moon landing hoax is a case in point. People wrote books and made lot of money spreading misinformation. See this for example. Apparently Bill Kaysing is a member of Mensa, the high IQ society. Its an irony that after American government’s spending billions of dollars and after developing such an amazing technology, for the moon missions, a significant portion of Americans believe that moon landing was a hoax. But fortunately for us, there are people like Phil Plait who run amazing websites like www.badastronomy.com and keep the true spirit of skepticism and rationalism alive.

It’s the age of information so keep alive the spirit of sharing the right information.

Coming up next: Religion in science classroom?